Music

Since They Left Us

After 15 years, the Avalanches follow their mashup masterpiece by taking listeners somewhere new.

Tony Di Blasi, Robbie Chater, and James Dela Cruz of the Avalanches are back with a new album, Wildflower.

EMI Music

Electronic dance music is for and about escapism, right? But which kind of escapism? There are as many kinds as there are types of dance music, and many styles suggest different methods of removal from the day to day. The headliners at big EDM festivals, whether crassly hooky like David Guetta or build and drop–heavy like the U.K. trance trio Above & Beyond, tend to vault between giddy peaks, aural airlifts from the mundane. The quasi-ethereal vibe of tropical house is the musical equivalent of taking a selfie in front of a waterfall. Unadulterated techno often acts as a sonic wormhole, transporting listeners into a dynamic of inner-space as outer-space—perfect for dark dance floors, maybe less so for bright living rooms.

And then there’s the Avalanches, an electronic group who, until this weekend, had exactly one studio album to their credit: Since I Left You, released in their native Australia in 2000 and elsewhere a year later. Since I Left You was unabashedly escapist: One of the first things we hear is an echoed voice telling us, “Watch your step—get a drink, have a good time, welcome to paradise,” as if, by themselves, the cooing choruses, birdcalls, giddily wandering flute, and strings recalling an Acapulco cruise in a 1930s Hollywood movie weren’t enough. Avalanches co-founder Robbie Chater told Triple J magazine: “[W]e went, ‘Why don’t we try to make a record that was more ’60s influence, with less bass, inspired by Phil Spector and the Beach Boys—but using dance music techniques? A light, FM-pop record?’ ”

Rather than sweeping you along with classic-rock dynamics, à la contemporaries such as the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers, Since I Left You sailed along like a whimsical dream. The album’s surreal air comes largely from its wide array of sources. The Avalanches, then a sextet, constructed Since I Left You almost entirely from samples—more than 900 of them, most of them obscure, but occasionally something very familiar would poke its head out: Madonna’s “Holiday” here, Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ “Stool Pigeon” there. Rather than serve as groove sources or reference points, on Since I Left You those two early-’80s club classics flit through the soundscape, more scenery than monoliths. That now-you-hear-it-now-you-don’t placement helped Since I Left You evoke a different kind of nonstop party than the Avalanches’ floor-driven counterparts. This was the sort of fête where you keep running into old friends, meeting new ones, overhearing conversations you have to get in on, but first you need to say hi to someone who just walked in, as soon as you’ve gotten another plateful of cookies.

That conviviality, as well as the Avalanches’ skill at cross-stitching samples, made their debut a critical smash (it finished 11th in the Village Voice’s annual critics’ poll, 14 places ahead of Daft Punk’s Discovery) and an instant cult item. Then … nothing, for years. Then nothing for even more years after that. Every so often there’d be a flurry. In 2004 came a gratuitous, messy remix of Belle & Sebastian’s “I’m a Cuckoo.” A handful of DJ-mix podcasts appeared around 2010 and then again in 2014. Yet a long wait seemed inevitable. After all, it had taken a lifetime (or six) to locate the 900 samples that made up the debut.

There isn’t an official sample count out yet for Wildflower, which the Avalanches scheduled for July 8, then released on Apple Music a week early, but it’s likely a lot smaller. Now a trio of Chater, Tony Di Blasi, and James Dela Cruz, the Avalanches still stitch their music together in the manner of Since I Left You. But Wildflower is immediately distinguished by more than two dozen featured guests, notably on the album’s first single, “Frankie Sinatra,” released last month and featuring rappers Danny Brown and MF Doom. Riding a galumphing beat reminiscent of Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood” (not an especially good sign), “Frankie Sinatra” initially seemed like a wheezing novelty with a couple of phoned-in spots. But hearing it on the album is a different matter. There, its snake-charmer flute sample and craggy calypso hook fit right into the crazy quilt surrounding them.

Nor is the appearance of some American rappers a sign of a sudden shift into seriousness. Wildflower is still escapist. “Over sea, under stone/ No one wants to be alone/ Everybody’s going somewhere,” goes “Colours” (an entirely sample-free track, Di Blasi boasted to Triple J). “Everybody’s got their somewhere/ Everybody knows a somewhere.” The zany, opulent orchestration is heavily reminiscent of the whimsical late-’60s Beach Boys, who rank high in the Avalanches’ canon: “Zap!” even has a lonesome harmonica and animal noises redolent of Pet Sounds and Smile, but there’s as much of the stranger, more fragmentary, more deliberately low-key songs like the ones dotting Wild Honey and Friends.

You might think rappers would clash with the easy-listening strings, woodwinds, and glee-club choruses with which the Avalanches lovingly festoon the mix. (On “Harmony,” the title is sung by voices, including Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue and Sydney singer Jonti, that sound as if they were born wearing embroidered sweater vests.) Nope. The MCs are here to have a good time, too, and they’re as loose as the music. Listen, for example, to Biz Markie’s turn on “The Noisy Eater,” a psychedelic kids’ record that features a sped-up sample of the Beatles’ “Come Together.” And so are the singers and players: Who’d have figured that Royal Trux/RTX singer Jennifer Herrema—the very picture of indie rock’s junkie-chic period—and Warren Ellis, violinist for the Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, would ever appear on something so jolly as Wildflower’s penultimate song, “Stepkids,” much less do so together?

Even if we don’t count the manipulation of samples (itself a 30-year-old practice by now), there is one old-fashioned thing about Wildflower’s construction: Its first half is better than the second. Though the Avalanches have made much of finishing it off with “Saturday Night Inside Out,” the first song on Chater’s initial demos for the new album 16 years ago, that track, like the album itself, sort of fizzles out. That’s easy to forgive on a collection that, just like its predecessor, feels like it’s taking you somewhere you haven’t been before.