Lucky Shiner

With a handful of short releases and remixes over the last year or so, Gold Panda has been lighting up the hype machines. That would be the part of the Internet age musicians welcome. The unwelcome part is the knee-jerk contrarianism that often meets the full-length debuts of blog darlings. Up till now, Gold Panda has seemingly managed to avoid that second part, due largely to a particularly strong album in Lucky Shiner. Aside from the acoustic guitar snoozer “Parents,” it displays the British producer’s mastery of samples that barely register as snippets. Those sounds are stretched, pitch-bent, filtered and finagled into light, trance-y compositions that work as both background music and as subtly layered textures, inviting listeners to pick them apart.