Another three years, another Gold Panda album – always something to look forward to. After releasing a string of singles and EPs before 2010, Gold Panda (unostentatiously known as Derwin Panda) matched the hype he amounted to with an intimate yet expansive first record Lucky Shiner. Three years later and Gold Panda released a difficult second album (Half Of Where You Live) which had a couple of gems but never quite lived up the début that still sits securely in my top ten records ever. However, having lived with his third album for some time now, I would even go as far as saying Good Luck And Do Your Best is his best album yet.

Immediately in any Gold Panda song, you instantly take in Gold Panda’s perpetual inspiration from Japan, where he once lived. Prior to recording Good Luck And Do Your Best, Derwin and photographer Laura Lewis took a trip across the country gathering field records and taking pictures to accompany them. This is where the album’s artwork has come from as well as the album’s title, a positive send off from a Hiroshima taxi driver.

This is as far as the album’s positivity goes, as straight from the first track you can feel an air of melancholy surrounding Gold Panda’s sound. This isn’t necessarily a shock as Derwin’s music has always held a feeling of loneliness and isolation, yet all the way through Good Luck And Do Your Best there is a constant sense of self-doubt. This is by no means a bad thing, as each track runs even deeper with emotion – something that was definitely amiss on Half Of Where You Live. This may have come from his thirst to pursue new projects and concepts away from the Gold Panda sound, which Derwin recently revealed in an interview with Ransom Note.

The mellow album opener ‘Metal Birds’ highlights perfectly the incredible mind Derwin has when using samples – in this case, it is chopped up field recordings off a headphone socket from a plane’s entertainment system. As much as field recordings are a big part of Gold Panda music, Derwin gets most of his sounds by sampling old vinyl like a Hip-Hop producer would. The following track, ‘In My Car’, is a great example of this, sounding like a Gold Panda take on the late Japanese Hip-Hop producer Nujabes. Born out of the idea of having a track to listen to whilst driving, Derwin has superbly captured what it is to be riding around on a hot day with the windows down and the music up.

Although Gold Panda’s oriental-influenced sound pallet is very recognisable throughout all three albums, having made sounds from samples of Japanese instruments, there is great variation between tracks. A track like ‘Pink And Green’, inspired by the colours that fill the country at certain times of year, sublimely hits that euphoric cerebral note that is so welcoming after you get home from a big night out, whilst ‘Song For A Dead Friend’ shows a disjointed experimental side and ‘I Am Real Punk’ has much more of an atmospheric feel.

Despite being a sound that is typically far away from popular music, Good Luck And Do Your Best is still strangely compatible with most – rich sounds, warm rhythms and inviting beats continuously draw you into his blissful vibrant world for the album’s duration. His music’s contemplative, calming and extremely beautiful – it’s hard to fault it really.
Iain Lauder