Gold Panda - Good Luck and Do Your Best

The Guardian 80

(City Slang)

It would be unfair compare Gold Panda to Caribou on the basis that they both make immersive, tender electronica, have at one point or another been signed to City Slang, and are named after cute mammals. But if the latter’s shuffling house rhythms and minor-key samples give you a kick then Mr Panda is certainly a pleasing chaser. He has not yet reached the same heights as his labelmate, perhaps because he favours glitch over a good hook. But his fourth album, though still twitching with IDM, breakbeats and hip-hop, bathes the instrumentals in a more intimate glow, crackling like vinyl playing under an amber nightlight. Inspired by a trip to Japan, it has oriental flourishes woven in subtly, from the relentless piano break of Chiba Nights paired with nimble two-step and fluttering flute, to the windchime shimmer of Pink and Green, and Song for a Dead Friend – a eulogy of cacophonous video game noises and Japanese koto. More than an audio travel journal, though, these songs are headline festival sundowners: the slow-burning acoustic thrum of I Am a Real Punk, the gorgeously textured, jazz-inflected Autumn Fall and Time Eater’s sombre temple-step. Bound to give you that warm, fuzzy feeling.

Drowned In Sound 80

‘Metal Bird’ opens the album with soaring, glitching vocal samples while a delicate guitar underpins everything. If you were expecting another dose of high energy electronica a la his 2013 album Half of Where You Live then you might be disappointed. What ‘Metal Bird’ tells us is that Panda has slowed things down. There is still plenty going on, production wise, but it’s not as in your face as previous releases. Halfway through everything goes up a notch as the breakbeats lope and skitter, showing that Panda might not have changed his way entirely. ‘In My Car’ continues in the same vein, as laidback beats cement the song in your head while quasi-Sixties soul vocals dance around in a hazy sunset of forward-thinking electronica.

‘Song For a Dead Friend’ sounds in places similar to fellow Chelmsford musician Squarepusher. The beats skitter past with lunatic delight while the synths and loops swirl about us like morning fog. The real stand out track is ‘I Am Real Punk’. Despite its acoustic calm, it packs a real punch. Repetitive guitar loops keep the song grounded while laconic bass, flitting beats and luscious strings give everything an eerie ethereal early morning vibe. This is probably down to the time of year Panda travelled to Japan ('Japan has this light that we don’t get here. It’s hard to explain. Well, Japan has this… at certain times of the year, it has this filter on stuff. So when we went the first time, there were a lot of pink and green colours').

Another stand out track is ‘Time Eater’. Being chocked full of chiming samples that evoke Japan’s musical heritage they are juxtaposed with popping beats and euphoric synth loops. This is mixture of the traditional and the contemporary sums up the album perfectly. It's relaxed but self-assured, full of unending charm and a positivity that is hard to ignore. ‘Unthank’ closes the album and acts like a bookend to ‘Metal Bird’. There is no percussion on it all, just layered droney synths. It feels like a post-modern lullaby at times, and if the album opens with a blazing sunshine vibe, this is a melancholy full moon.

When you get past the electronic glitches, jazz flourishes and folk tendencies, Good Luck and Do Your Best feels like a garage album. Choppy beats and rhythms along with shuffling percussion helps create a feeling of urban movement and flux. There is a swagger to the songs that is hard to ignore – Panda has created the album that he has always hinted at.

Pitchfork 74

Two years ago Gold Panda made a series of trips across Japan with the photographer Laura Lewis to gather visuals and field recordings for what was supposed to be “a sight and sound documentary,” perhaps not unlike Chris Marker’s quiet and thoughtful film essays. So far the documentary hasn’t been made, but the impressions of the trips during the fall and spring of 2014 led to his first album in three years, Good Luck and Do Your Best. Apparently the moment of inspiration and the album’s title came from a chance interaction with a taxi driver who wished them luck, saying those very words as they exited the cab. He wrote the album in Chelmsford, using Laura's photos, their colors and experiences, as catalysts for the album’s 11 tracks.

It is decidedly brighter, more low-key, and less dance-oriented than his previous outing Half of Where You Live. Instead this newest album seems to fit more into the structure and mood of his debut Lucky Shiner. The same spirit of nostalgia, pleasantly handmade feel (which comes from his expert use of MPCs), and wistful joy pervades Good Luck and Do Your Best. It sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way.

The best tracks capture the short-lived exuberance of the photographer's golden hour. When the sun is on the cusp of setting, if you’re lucky, streetscapes will be awash in an exceedingly warm golden light. It makes whatever you photograph seem more buoyant, colorful, and evanescent. The bright drum-pad meditation of “In My Car” and the understated string arrangements in “Time Eater” all speak to this kind of feeling. Gold Panda is at his best making lush and ambulatory compositions, and the relaxed itinerancy of a vacation is most evident in his more minimal sound studies, like “Unthank” and “I Am Real Punk” which rely on just a few elements, like the repetition of plucked strings or a single synth looped.

Those songs in particular reminded me of the producer Suzanne Craft, or the compositions by the Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita. They have same ability to create a grand feeling atmosphere out of minimal ingredients. This album only doesn’t work when it gestures towards faster paces. “Song for a Dead Friend” stands out as a one of the album’s true missteps, a seemingly juke-inspired track that twists an ankle and falls flat.

In terms of samples used, the Japanese inspiration seemed to come mostly from the use of string instruments, but otherwise it’s more muted than the story suggests. Two music videos were released in advance of the album (for “Pink & Green” and “Time Eater”) and the videos try to give an idea of what the documentary might have been. In “Pink & Green” in particular we find Gold Panda and Laura in the midst of the vacation. They walk the streets, gaze at the sights, eat at McDonalds. They take the train and laugh at dinner and sing karaoke, as tourists must feel compelled to do in Japan. There’s a kernel in the visual aesthetic and silent narrative that might not mean to point to Lost in Translation, but it’s hard to avoid. How can you appreciate a vacation in a foreign place, thoughtfully and gracefully? Missteps seem inevitable.

Listening to this album, I wondered if Gold Panda set out to explore some of these thoughts from the pads of an MPC. Does archiving a vacation in sounds or pictures, making art of it, do justice to the essential passing of things? Is nostalgia destructive or generative? At the end of it all, the music escapes the expectations its creators imbue it with. As its title suggests Good Luck and Do Your Best is a modest and heartfelt attempt to celebrate a memory and place that you continue to love even at a distance.