Gold Panda – Snow and Taxis
You don’t see his face in the video, but there’s some lovely plants…
[Video][Myspace]
[6.57]
John Seroff: Gold Panda’s first song on the Jukebox entranced me with a monster hook and surprising brevity. I was curious to find what a full-length single would sound like and now I know: like a two and a half minute song played twice. “Snow and Taxis” is still mildly catchy high BPM IDM but the mystique is gone, the xylophone is eventually grating and I liked everything better when it shut down before the party was over.
[6]
Martin Skidmore: I loved the last one of his we covered here, and this is just as impressive. It’s kind of deep house, but very imaginatively put together on every level: bass, treble, beats, effects, everything. It’s captivating, lovely and continually gives you plenty to listen to as well as being simply gorgeous. I would have preferred it to go on much longer.
[9]
Iain Mew: On an album which is never less than hypnotising, this is the most straightforward track. Which is not to say that it doesn’t throw in some awed moments of “what just happened there?”, just that it’s very much a mood piece, the mood being relaxed and contemplative with a touch of melancholy. But while it constantly twinkles beautifully, wonders are worked with the shortest of string samples and the texture shifts and molds into new shapes all the time. The result is something which rewards in abundance both engaged listening and relaxing into its trance.
[9]
Mallory O’Donnell: Just because the program is called Fruity Loops doesn’t mean that all of your loops actually have to be fruity.
[3]
Mark Sinker: The shtick is strong — ferocious ear for microdetail, witty sense of what to omit, when to anticipate, and how to get the two meanings of skip to talk to one another — but for me this is a minimalist squeezeplay too far, the motif not much more than a two-note pedal (or layered sequence of same), which means when the pressure lifts and here’s the held-note goth-vocal fluting… well, it’s pretty, yes, but it’s also a bit is-that-it? Maybe it just doesn’t make sense as a single.
[6]
Chuck Eddy: I kept waiting for the cab to get stuck in the blizzard, but no such luck. Still, for post-post-post-post-“Autobahn” car-techno, mildly evocative.
[5]
Anthony Easton: Like how the beats are hidden under the atmospheric noise, and I like how sweet it is — I hope they are named after an animal that looks somewhere between a tamarin and a red panda, because that would be awesome.
[8]