You – Gold Panda You – Gold Panda (Free Download / Buy)

Electronic music has become a lot more diverse and a lot more intricate during the last year, with some of the staff’s favorite albums of 2010 falling under the electronic genre. With that, and the hit release of 2009 “Quitters Raga”, came high expectations for the debut full-length from Gold Panda.

Lucky Shiner is a complex album that shows how much potential Gold Panda has as a rising artist. However, the British Asian Studies major failed to maximize on it. Several tracks on Lucky Shiner are filled with beats that get you into the song, increase your interest level, and get you excited to see what’s coming next. The problem is, the answer in a couple of instances is nothing.

The nature of Gold Panda’s style is to increase the number of sounds that are simultaneously going on, giving the music a rich and layered sound. In a track like “Before We Talked”, we see the finer details of beat making and layers being explored, but it seems as if the momentum of the song plateaus early. On the opening track of, “You” (there are two tracks with the same title on the album), a concept of “we” is developed as the words “you and me” are fused together electronically and then broken down and cycled in a trippy loop. However, the tracks seem cyclical, rather than progressive.

Without being too negative, the album gives off an overall sense of an abyss to nothing. Other reviews and authors have used words like “nostalgic”, “fulfilling”, “personal”, and “poignant” to describe the album. However, Lucky Shiner does none of that for me. While the beats that Panda has to offer are entertaining and fun to get lost in, they are still self-contained. It feels as if you’re being left in a world of stagnation from track to track.

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