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.
