To listen to the Avalanches is to wrestle with time. The sample-rich music made by this group of Australian DJs makes you think about where its pieces come from, what those fragments meant to you then, and what they mean to you embedded into the group's finished songs. There’s nostalgia and loss ingrained in every bar, and you can sense the erratic movement of past, present, and future from the first listen.
Speaking of time, there’s also the fact that the Avalanches waited 16 years to follow up their debut album, 2000’s landmark Since I Left You. To be a fan of the Avalanches, you had to be patient. Some of the delay was to be expected. Their first record was said to have thousands of samples, but you never can tell with a figure like that—let’s just agree that it contained a lot. And working with samples means submitting yourself to a longer timetable. Because while Jarvis Cocker might pick up a guitar and write eight songs in two days, building music from other music means you have to do a lot of listening. Which means sampling artists spend a great deal of time engaged in the same activity as their audience—driving around with the radio on, poised by the turntable, dropping a needle, clicking around on YouTube, walking around with headphones. And there are no shortcuts. Throw in the usual long-delayed-album mix of bad equipment, poor health, perfectionism, and clearance issues, and who knows, maybe we’re lucky to get Wildflower, the first new Avalanches record in 16 years.
It’s a music business truism that every sample-heavy instrumental act will eventually work with guest vocalists. As satisfying as it can be to assemble new music from old pieces, every producer, deep down, eventually wants to make their own primary source. Wildflower’s guest vocalists—including Detroit rapper Danny Brown, Biz Markie, rap duo Camp Lo, Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev, Chaz Bundick of Toro Y Moi, David Berman of Silver Jews, Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux/Black Bananas—are what set it apart from the first record. Since I Left You had huge swaths of constantly shifting sound, flowing as one epic suite, and it was often hard to know where one song ended and another began; almost half the songs on Wildflower are clearly set up to showcase a rapper or singer who have written something close to a proper song, so it’s a series of tentpole tracks joined by gorgeous instrumental interludes of the kind only the Avalanches can assemble.
At its best, Wildflower feels like an extension of Since I Left You, hewing close to its predecessor in terms of style, sound, approach, and texture—you would never mistake this for an album by anyone else. The Avalanches make music that’s open, welcoming, soft, gentle; the track construction is virtuosic, but it never wants to show off, and the beat-jacking never feels competitive. In addition to the found sounds, the album has a lot of new instrumentation, most of it presented to mix seamlessly with the samples. Film composer Jean-Michel Bernard adds orchestrations to a handful of tracks, upping the quotient of Disneyfied wonder. The general approach to production is classic Avalanches: AM Gold pop with its sweet strings bleeds into delicate disco with beats inspired by early hip-hop unpinning the whole, imbuing it with a kind of bookish innocence common to the world of indie pop. If the turntable-scratched choruses are gone, replaced by live people at a microphone, the sonic universe they exist in has, thankfully, changed very little.
On the whole, the indie pop songs are more successful than the tracks featuring rappers. “Colours,” the first Jonathan Donahue feature, sounds like a lost classic of psychedelic pop from a forgotten Elephant 6 offshoot, a lysergic mix of backward beats, warbly guitar, and wide-eyed vocals awed by the overpowering beauty of the world. The Toro Y Moi collaboration “If I Was a Folkstar” takes the same tape-stretched, sun-bleached feel and mixes it the kind of bouncy and playful disco beat Bundick has mastered in his own music. Jennifer Herrema usually speaks to us from behind a cloud of weary cynicism, but on “Stepkids” she sounds downright hopeful and maybe even happy, as she gets wistful over “a pack of smokes and a can of spray paint.” David Berman’s spoken-word turn on “Saturday Night Inside Out” sounds like something you might find on the back half of a weird forgotten singer/songwriter record from the ‘70s, which is perfect, and somewhere behind him are backing vocals from Father John Misty. The Avalanches have a knack for bringing all of these disparate voices into their world.
The tracks with rappers are a bit more mixed, but there are still great moments. Nostalgia works a bit differently in rap, and here and there a particular combination of beats and voice bring back a memory that didn’t necessarily need to be brought back. Most notable among these is lead single “Frankie Sinatra” featuring Danny Brown which, with its strained oompah beat and sing-song rap, reminded many of Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood,” a song few people who lived through that era feel compelled to relive now, to put it mildly. Biz Markie’s comic turn on “Noisy Eater” is also in danger of being too cute by half, but it gets over by sheer commitment to its evocation of childhood, sounding like some bent version of a Nickelodeon jingle. And Camp Lo’s explosive rhymes on “Because I’m Me” are brimming with joy.
The stable of vocalists underscores another way the Avalanches play with time: the guests are mostly members of Generation X, who arguably made their best music during the Bill Clinton era. Which, when combined with the fact that collage music built from dense samples is technique closely identified with the ‘90s, gives the album a weird funhouse-mirror quality. Nostalgia moves in 20-year cycles, which means the ‘90s sampling artists the Avalanches were inspired by were drawing from the ‘70s. So Wildflower’s references are doubled: the original music is sliced and diced and processed and filtered through a sensibility that emerged two decades later, and then that feeling is reflected once again into the present moment, two more decades later. The feeling can either be comforting or unsettling, depending on your angle of approach.
When Since I Left You arrived in 2000 it seemed less like the arrival of a new kind of pop than a bittersweet farewell to a decade that was coming to a close. The album mixed the technique and spirit of the Dust Brothers and transported it from the urban street to an open field far somewhere far from civilization, some place where everyone is dressed colorfully and they’re either on MDMA or they remember their days taking it fondly. The Avalanches are all about feel. And Wildflower, though it misses some of its predecessor’s thematic unity and from-nowhere sense of surprise, has that feel in spades. Their work continues to mine a deceptively narrow emotional world—new love, childhood playfulness, wistful sadness, happy feelings of connection—but renders it better than just about any music ever made.
