The second album from Lilacs & Champagne takes the provocation of yesteryear and softens it at the corners, offering a form of easy-on-the-ear radicalism. It's not an overtly political work, although it is one that illustrates how just about anything can retreat into the margins and become a form of background noise. Lilacs & Champagne are the sample-happy duo of Alex Hall and Emil Amos, who craft this stuff away from their main focus in the instrumental rock act Grails. This is a continuation of the work started on their eponymous 2012 debut, with porn and B-movie dialogue mixed up with studied guitar soloing and a blitz of lounge oriented samples. The title is presumably a reference to Danish Blue, a documentary from 1968 that advocated for the legalization of pornography in Denmark. But nothing here seeks to agitate, instead taking outsider art and attempting to expose its soft underbelly.
The references Hall and Amos flip through in their work are an amalgam of the overt and the obscure. "Alone Again And..." offers a reduction of the hippy protest dream that makes a titular reference to Arthur Lee's work in Love, while the following "Police Story" works through familiar emblems from TV cop show themes. But the cut-and-paste nature of their work means it doesn't just hark back to the original source material-- it does it by way of similarly minded 90s artists such as Tipsy and Sukia, who both had a fondness for piecing tracks together around lounge/exotica samples. The difference here is that this album is a much more passive listening experience, not really inviting the listener to get involved, apparently content to let everything sink into the sidelines. Even an intentional piece of button-pushing dialogue on the title track is barely pushed to the fore. You almost expect someone to leap out and apologise for it being there.
That coy sense of playfulness is a big part of the appeal when Hall and Amos get it right. The expertly disjointed "Sour/Sweet" finds beauty in twining peace with chaos, where a scattered drum sample drunkenly lurches into cut-ups of a fresh soul singer. It doesn't belabor the point, getting out in just over two-minutes, offering the perfect distillation of what this band could potentially be. The longer material often gets ponderous, attempting to find a resting ground between psychedelic guitar stokes and something approaching easy listening, but failing to really tap into the power of either. When Stereolab were sourcing artists like Esquivel and Martin Denny, they primarily recognized the striking sounds they were using, culled from strange percussion tools, odd deviations in dynamics, or a great sway of vocal harmonies. Danish & Blue doesn’t get to that spot, instead settling into being that thing you hum while doing other, more important things.
Hall has stated that this record is intended to be a "direct tribute to the musical outsiders of the past," which makes a strange fit for the reticence and casual air of the album. In a sense it's a logical next step for the dilution of works that could once have been read as insurrectionary, a further blunting of the knife for anyone who might still be incensed that music by the Clash was used in a jeans ad. Taking that fire and pushing it further into the background, turning it into an approximation of what Erik Satie wonderfully dubbed "furniture music," feels like an endpoint of sorts, if not a particularly interesting one. But Danish & Blue doesn't come close to either making a statement or reaching into the daze that made their debut so pleasingly disorienting. This is the early-hours sound you nod off to, not the one that has you second guessing what you heard.
