The first seven seconds of Lilacs & Champagne's self-titled album contain an appropriated piece of music so instantly resonant to a particular segment of listenership that it might dictate the way they hear the remainder of the album. It's the short fanfare ITC Entertainment used in its mid-1970s pre-show identification, smothered under enough reverb and crackle to evoke something not entirely dusted off before being spooled up, and if you recognize it at all it's probably from one of two contexts: either the beginning of "The Muppet Show" or "It's a Big Daddy Thing". Say what you will about pop-music hauntology and its reliance on plucking at our memories, but that kind of cue isn't the entire conversation-- just an attention-getting way to start one.
Once Lilacs & Champagne strikes that nerve, it pulls you through one of those experiences unique to sample-based, mostly instrumental music-- reconstructed old sounds built up into a theater of the mind, the soundtrack for a story that exists only in the blanks that listeners fill. Alex Hall and Emil Amos have spent enough time in Grails to have both the desire and the means to translate their ear for psych-inflected desert rock into something a bit different, more indebted to sounds that already exist but still have new juxtapositions in there somewhere. And the album that Hall and Amos put together is as much an evocation of Stones Throw genre-hoarding fadedness as it is of post-Syd, pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd in European-art-film-soundtrack mode. Think of the spookiest bits, intentional or otherwise, of small-press acid rock, library-music ephemera, or trans-continental exotica-- Lilacs & Champagne brings it all to a head.
At its simplest, Lilacs & Champagne runs its MPC fodder through a hangar-sized cavern of reverb, a move that gives its musically cinematic allusions the sensation of bringing dark, movie-theater isolation out into the great wide sunlit open.This gives its guitar/percussion interplay a sort of twangy, nerve-rattling airiness, another logical midpoint on the dub/rock continuum that Internal Wrangler tangled with a dozen years back. "Sensations" and "Laid Fucking Back" in particular have the cast of bleary-eyed, heatstruck codeine rock, Blue Öyster Cult's "Then Came the Last Days of May" stretching on into an endless summer. Yet those cuts aren't alone in maintaining an overarching mood of sun-yellowed strangeness, even as they're interspersed with DOOM-ready slabs of grindhouse oddness like "King of Kings" and "Listener X" that wrangle the stoner-rock lineage into more explicitly hip-hop territory.
But above and beyond the memory-blurring allusions to vaguely experienced times and places that come with this kind of stylistic hybrid, the feel of Lilacs & Champagne and its counterculture-exploitation-soundtrack appeal trades on a certain distinct self-awareness of its own evocative potential. It helps that there's an undercurrent of emphasizing what happens when mellow pleasantness, of-the-moment fad-chasing, and feel-good sophisticated kitsch grow unsettling with age. Love-scene string sections and guitars that sound like they could've come from an earnest hippies-for-Jesus folk mass are phased into decaying oblivion. The chipper Quaalude frolic interpolation of "Anything Goes" that "Nice Man" opens with could be the remnant of some now-irrelevant celebrity's hokey network variety show, but the lo-fi tape wobble that so many wave-gazers filtered their bedroom pop through turns this particular clip into the stuff of The Shining, especially when the skittering horror-movie pianos roll in. And the lounge-crooner refrain of "Lilacs" that gives the group and album their name bobs with an almost disembodied shakiness over a bed of synthesizers suited more to stalkers than romantics. It's sort of campy stuff, but it's gripping in its willful oddity, and its synthesis of long-lost psych and longer-lost B-movie mood-setting is dead on. The only way it could be more faithful to that experience would be if you stumbled across it at 3 a.m. while channel-surfing, and spent the next hour wondering if anybody at the station knew something this strange was even being aired. Assuming you weren't dreaming it.
