Skip to main content

Day: 23 March 2013

Review: Gold Panda – Trust EP

Written by Daniel Jones on . Posted in Music.

Notown
March 2013
7/10

It’s no surprise that Gold Panda (first name Derwin, last name unknown) hasn’t been the most prolific of beatsmiths over the past few years.  Lucky Shiner landed like a ton of bricks in 2010, and it was always going to take time to build another collection of tracks that could even begin to match the impression that his early work made.  This cheeky four-tracker is a solid effort though and does stand on its own as a quality piece of ambient electronica.  Good work Derwin.

Trust feels much more stripped back, cleaner and less cluttered than any of his previous efforts, meaning more space for fatter synths to weave in and out of each other.  The intro is  a bit on the moody side, but that moodiness is necessary to ease the transition into the title track ‘Trust’.  When the warm horns kick in they seem to draw you in to an uncanny sense of melancholy.  Kind of like going out to sea on a foggy day.  Kind of.

A thudding 4/4 backbone frames slightly off-kilter melodies, leading in to ‘Burnt-Out Car In a Forest’.  Here, clashing hi hats give way to an assortment of clicks, claps, bells and bloops, which keep the EP driving forward freely.  Derwin even claimed on Twitter that this is the best song he’s ever made.  Worth a listen for that statement alone.

Which leads us to ‘Casyam_59#02’, the slow-burner.  This is Gold Panda in downtempo gear, going for the jugular in terms of sincerity.  Although he doesn’t quite hit that mark, it’s still a soothing end to the record, more meditative than mawkish.  It’s also the best exhibition of how Derwin’s mastery in arrangement has developed.  The synths are nowhere near as rough or fuzzy as they were on Before and the cuts are kept on much tighter reins.

That said, I suppose part of the charm of his earlier releases did stem from their raw, gauzy quality.  It’ll be very interesting to see what the album brings later this year.  Now that Derwin has sharpened his tools, we may have to get used to a more refined Gold Panda.  A polished Gold Panda.

Live: Sam Lee & Friends

Written by Polly Checkland Harding on . Posted in Music.

15th March 2013
Band On The Wall
8/10

Why pay to watch a band when you can download the songs for free? Let me tell you about seeing Sam Lee live. So, we sit – hey, this is folk music, there’ll be no mosh pit – we sit close up to the low stage, and under the dim light you almost feel part of the set. Lee – really tall and elegant, not wearing shoes – is surrounded by unusual instruments. His music comes from travellers and gypsies and he tells the story behind each song: one he’s borrowed from a woman who sings gripping a pint glass, ready to hurl at any talkers in the audience.

It’s the stories that make Lee’s reinventions so startling to listen to live.  Lee cites the controversy ‘The Jews Garden’ caused when his 2012 Mercury Prize nominated album, Ground Of Its Own, was released: the lyrics are old and were originally spread as anti-Semitic propaganda, describing the tricking and killing of a child by a Jewess.  What’s frightening is that, without the story, the violin’s suspenseful one-not sawing and the otherworldly flexing of a jew’s harp could conjure up a more reductive sense of horror around the words.

The set is mixed with songs from an Irish traveller, Tom McCarthy: he has depleted teeth and looks mischievous singing about a woman “married to a man with no balls at all”.  The words are fun and rude and were passed to him from a 74-year-old woman – these are the cleanest of her lyrics.  Even the instruments Lee uses have stories: in ‘Black Dog and Sheep Crook’, his voice navigates through the melodic geography of shruti box and Japanese koto, the latter used by courtesans to entertain rich men, he explains.  Remembering centuries of oral history, the words around the songs are really worth hearing.  Thank you for listening.