Gold Panda has garnered critical acclaim with his 2 EPs and few singles. A lot of people have been waiting to hear what the long-awaited full length debut “Lucky Shiner” will sound like. The wait is over.
Yesterday Stereogum streamed “Lucky Shiner,” and thanks to the Internet and all its glorious widgets you can stream it here. We listened to it a few times today — here’s the run down.
It starts off with one of the few tracks on the album to use a vocal sample. “You” contains chopped up samples that create words resembling “you and me.” The track is one of the heavier-hitting on the album and is a great start off.
The second track sucks. The third track “Parents” is a song containing no beat and two guitar tracks with some ambient noise in the background. It’s birds or some shit like that.
The next two tracks appear to be the first two singles off the album. It wouldn’t be surprising to see either one of these in a car commercial, if you know what I mean.
The album then enters the 8-bit realm with “Before We Talked.” That was a shocker. Then again, two songs ago there was an instrumental guitar track.
“Marriage” might be one of the strongest of the eleven tracks. It’s another one of those car-commercial songs that they use while describing the elegance of the 3-series.
Then it goes ambient. The first 3 minutes of “I’m With You But I’m Lonely” sound like those pure mood CDs, but not as yanni-esque. Then it goes back to 8-bit with a little hint of glitch.
Track 10 takes another 360 and heads all the way to India with the eastern-tinged “India Lately,” which includes the requisite tribal chants.
The last song is the same title as the first one. Thank God it’s not the Napster days, that’d be a bitch to find. Also, this song sounds like Boards of Canada.
The album lacks focus, but all of the tracks do have one thing in common. They’re great songs to study to, and couldn’t have come out at a better time. either. I’m sure this fall semester kids everywhere will be in coffee shops with Gold Panda in the headphones. This release might just live up to the hype after all.
Not only is there a new album, there’s a new video for the first single “Snow & Taxis” and it’s very well shot. It includes extreme close-ups of foliage and fungi and follows some mysterious hoody dude. The video is below.
Snow And Taxis from Gold Panda on Vimeo.
September 20, 2010 at 8:43 pm, Brandonisrosales said:
no no no. I'm waiting for works by the REAL original Panda Bear, Noah Lennox. WTF is this?