The Avalanches review, We Will Always Love You: A Nasa-inspired journey into the great sonic beyond
Ask any Renaissance fresco painter or maker of surprise internet pizza cakes: you can’t rush intricate art. Piecing their “plunderphonic” music together note-by-note from thousands of samples and micro-snippets from old records – and then trying to clear the rights to them all – electro-Michelangelos The Avalanches famously took 16 years to follow up their seminal 2000 debut Since I Left You with 2016’s Wildflower. Ignoring the fact that John Lennon released his entire life’s work in about the same amount of time and still managed five duvet years off, this third album in two decades feels a lifetime wiser.
Well versed in giving dead artists new life through the resurrective power of sampling, Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi have forged We Will Always Love You as a mature exploration of their concept of “forever voices”. They’ve tempered their youthful party vibe to contemplate themes of the afterlife and cosmic profundity; the album was inspired by the story of science communicator Carl Sagan proposing to his partner, Nasa creative director Ann Druyan, in 1977, then recording her love-struck heartbeat for inclusion on the Golden Record – humanity’s demo tape placed inside Voyager 1 – and the idea that radio waves of Lennon, Elvis and Hendrix are still radiating eternally into deep space. The result is a 70-minute journey into the great sonic beyond.
We Will Always Love You opens with a fictional answerphone message from a dead lover (“Ghost Story”) and closes with a Morse code-like rendition of the broadcast beamed into space in 1974, containing details of human DNA (“Weightless”). In-between lies an ever-expanding universe of sound. The crackle of antique blues 78s, intergalactic transmission noises, tumbles of jazz piano, spectral electronic shimmers, heavy breathing scam-bots, the babble of a Seventies funk soiree, an occasional helicopter and so much more, all intermingled with molecular skill, in search of the romance and ennui of the otherworldly.
Like Wildflower, We Will Always Love You features contemporary rappers and alt-rock pioneers layering rhymes and melodies over its sampled collages, but expands its remit to take in Eighties soul stars, trip-hop gods, emo rockers, original punks and indie guitar heroes. MGMT and Johnny Marr unite on the upbeat psych pop of “The Divine Chord”, accompanied by a cherubic child’s choir. Sananda Maitreya – Terence Trent D’Arby in his former life – belts hearty soul wisdoms into a plush haze of backwards strings on “Reflecting Light”, duetting with an arcane 1970 sample of Vashti Bunyan. Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo and tonsilitis-voiced rapper Pink Siifu collide on the catchy alt-pop “Running Red Lights”. Perry Farrell, Tricky, Kurt Vile, Cornelius, Neneh Cherry and Sampa the Great all feature; Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O gets thrown away on the 30-second spoken word “Dial D For Devotion”. The effect is kaleidoscopic, fractals from a century of pop culture swirling around a nebulous funk-soul core.
Add in copious mood-setting interludes – most spookily “Solitary Ceremonies”, wherein a 1940s radio medium channels the spirit of Liszt – and it sounds like the record Gorillaz have always wanted to make. Most remarkably, over 25 tracks, there’s precious little filler (notably Daft Punk pastiche “Born To Lose” and Jamie xx’s formulaic rave phases on “Wherever You Go”, designed to make you worry you’re having a brain haemorrhage) and such frequent melodic joy. The Clash’s Mick Jones and ragga rapper Cola Boyy groove incongruously along to the fabulous Seventies disco glitz of “We Go On”. Blood Orange has a haunting turn on the sullen soul title track. The sunbeam chorus of “Interstellar Love” passes clean through you like solar neutrinos. Reflective, immersive and, in a more subtle way, euphoric, this is the record to put the art into The Avalanches’ party.
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