Gold Panda – Quitters Raga
Peckham grump unleashes sub-two minute glitchfest – somehow, we’re quite impressed…
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[7.44]
Doug Robertson: Anything that can even vaguely be described as “glitchy” tends to get the thumbs up in my book, but this is something else entirely. If “Wow!” wasn’t already pronounced “Wow!” then it would probably sound like this.
[10]
Alfred Soto: Vampire Weekend and M.I.A.: add sociopolitical lyrics. Stir to a rich golden brown.
[5]
Martin Skidmore: This is bizarre: heavy, juddering quotes from Indian ragas, rumbling bass and frequent glitchy moments. It’s short, very intense and completely compelling and fascinating.
[9]
Michaelangelo Matos: A whopping 1:57: is this the shortest Jukebox single ever? It’s cute, too, with its glitches, sitar, and odd little vocal hook all evidence of the laptop-indie production that sounds more normal all the time.
[7]
Pete Baran: Like the time flashes in Lost taking place in an Indian Restaurant during the popadom course, even down to the 1970s style restaurant trappings. The video should be one of those neverending waterfall pictures running upwards. Deadly nosebleeds notwithstanding, a pleasant experience.
[7]
Chuck Eddy: Clink and clank and fuzz and blur and static, with incidental Far Asian melodies and voices weaving in and out. Cute enough, for two minutes. Could maybe see using it to fill space at the end of a C-90 mixtape, but even then I’d definitely prefer chopping it off in the middle.
[6]
Anthony Easton: Tight, quick, and so well constructed, an elegant example of almost pure concision, with that collapse somewhere around the one minute mark–like that myth of the one flaw in an otherwise perfect killing.
[8]
John Seroff: I’m still stumbling toward a clearer definition of “dubstep”, so correct me if I’m wrong for stuffing “Quitters Raga” into that pigeonhole. Whatever else it is, the song is perfectly lovely; an awkwardly, inexplicably wistful, glitchy Bollywood dance number with a near-Four Tet air. I only wish “Quitters” were longer; I’d love to see the theme develop further. Still, compulsively loopable and a tremendous introduction to a new artist I hope to hear more from soon.
[8]
David Moore: Chopped and screwy Bollywood chorus is mechanically reined in to militant eighths, then blasted into space with heavy-handed vocal fuckery and lasers. But despite all the tics there’s a kind of serenity in it: a guitar part that could have been ripped from Kings of Convenience, a nice sitar line. In fact I could do with a little less chopping and a little more of letting the beauty play for its own sake. The excessive futzing feels like a nervous wishing away of the song’s plainer prettiness.
[7]
Cute enough track but I don’t see/hear/think of this as any kind of single. Sorry for not voting but my score would have brought down the average so GOLD PANDA YOU ARE WELCOME.
My score would have brought down the average too, it just seems like a mess. I like the constituent parts but they’ve been put together really shambolically.
Huh, though this would land closer to 6.5 overall. Still, I REGRET NOTHING.
Interesting, the vocals used here didn’t really seem like raga to me (and my embarrassingly limited palate thus pointed me toward Bollywood instead), but in trying to Youtube some kinda halfway point I found Indian Idol, Idea Star Singer, in which raga fusion is a category.
I meant to amplify my last point (but forgot to): “normal” is this kind of music’s undoing.
Yeah this baffled me a bit when I heard it last year and it still does baffle me – nice bit of incidental somethingness in the middle of a record, turned into its own rateable thing – 6 I guess? Can’t begrudge it a higher mark really.
re: Matos’ query about whether it’s the shortest, I think “Rubber Lover” was shorter. I liked that more than this, but I thought it was underrated!