The debut album from British electronic producer Gold Panda is immersed in nostalgia. It's a go-to emotion for every era, but, thanks to the eternal memory bank known as the Internet, this is a particularly fruitful time for looking back. But not all remembrances are created equal. The majority of today's cultural nostalgia is dominated by a cheap, remember-that-show quality that ultimately infantilizes its audience into submission. Shameless nods to yesterday's TV/music/movies are fine for a quick escape, but they can also make tomorrow that much more daunting. Still, when approached with more care, peering into the past can be invigorating. Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig summed up the two sides with characteristic eloquence on this year's Contra, singing about how we're "nostalgic for garbage, desperate for time." Koenig is one of the good guys in the current Nostalgia Wars, and so is Gold Panda.
The London-based producer's main instrument is an Akai MPC2000XL sampler, which allows him to rearrange, repurpose, and recycle previously recorded sounds at the touch of a button. By nature, it's a nostalgic machine. And he uses it to push things forward; he's not just sampling what we know already on Lucky Shiner, he's using sounds that mean something to him-- a tapping keyboard, a sped-up or slowed-down recording of someone saying the word "you," exotic-sounding instruments unfamiliar to a Westerner's experience-- and attempting to universalize them. This process is something of an internal challenge, as the beat maker told me in an interview last year. "I usually find stuff that I hope no one really knows or cares about," he said, talking about his sample selection. "If I'm ripping off something that's already brilliant, what's the point?" Because of this, the dusty melancholia of Lucky Shiner feels earned and lived-in. It's a far cry from just naming your new bedroom-pop band Double Dare.
While this is the first Gold Panda long-player after a slew of EPs and remixes over the last couple years, he just turned 30. Not to get all "respect your elders" with it, but the Londoner's relatively advanced age probably adds depth to his stoic reminisces. As a hushed acoustic guitar/found sounds track, "Parents" is a telling anomaly on the album. The song is introduced by some heavily-accented words from the producer's grandmother, after whom Lucky Shiner is also named. It's an interlude that offers little on its own but offers an irrefutable bit of personalization early on and is invaluable to the album's homespun wistfulness as a whole. Even if you can't understand what she's saying, the voice has the unmistakably kind lilt of a grandmother; it draws you into the instrumental elegance elsewhere.
In sonic terms, Gold Panda breathes the same kind of life into his work as Four Tet. His beats are mechanical but also intensely human. But Gold Panda's trigger finger is a bit itchier. His signature tic involves short, unique samples that burst in rhythmic repetition. So on opener "You", the words "you and me" are sliced into individual pieces and then tapped in brain-screwing succession as a bulbous beat makes the song all too ready for the club inside your head. And "Before We Talked" rides on a quicksilver pulse made up of tiny squelches and glitches that are Aphex-like in precision and scope. Oftentimes, plinking notes from various unique, piano-like sounds add a spotlit solemnity underneath or alongside the drums. A sense of well-thought-out album-style completeness is evident throughout, too, with the two aforementioned tracks coming with their own sequels later on in the form of "After We Talked" and a closer also named "You". But the last track isn't a reprise as much as a hard-won ending point; whereas the opener is fast and friendly, it's "you"s popping quick, Lucky Shiner's finale is noticeably more contemplative with the sampled "you" now stretched-out and slowed. It's always about "you," but perhaps not the same "you" as before.
In some ways, the idea of nostalgia is averse to growth. Mourning the loss of time (even good time) can be intoxicating and stagnant. That's not what Gold Panda is doing. He's recognizing that loss, articulating it with a multitude of finely-placed sounds, and then coming to grips with his place in the here and now. He's making nostalgia work for him without consuming him. "I'm just really happy to be happy for the first time since I was about 20," he said last year. "It's nice to just do my hobby and be able to live." It's easy to hear his joy through those rejiggered memories.
