With “No Bad Memories,” the Australian trio continues, with flair, to blend genres and realms with varying degrees of success.
If it is virtually possible to sample anything and everything, how can one avoid getting lost in a labyrinth of sounds? Sixteen years, that’s how long The Avalanches took to pick up the thread and deliver Wildflower (2016), their second album and spiritual successor to Since I Left You (2000), a true cathedral of samples released at the dawn of the new millennium.
The trio, now comprising Tony Di Blasi, Robbie Chater, and former Midnight Juggernauts member Andy Szekeres, does not embark on a new record without having carefully weighed their approach.
Advertising jingles, floppy disks and a ticking time bomb
After We Will Always Love You (2020), the third LP that cast the vastness of space as the new horizon of their sound, The Avalanches pivot back toward a more prosaic universe: advertising jingles, the first iPods, floppy disks, and the ticking time bomb born from liberalism and market capitalism.
Ironically titled No Bad Memories, this fourth album marks in their discography a sharper, or at least more erratic, approach to their sampling techniques.
Although it remains an Avalanches record through and through (playful, virtuosic, radiant, loaded with childlike choirs and melodies to die for), No Bad Memories interrupts abruptly, rethinks the material of its own sounds, and broadcasts an oddity that hovers between nostalgia and dystopia.
In this regard, the record seems to tread on the FM fields staked out by Oneohtrix Point Never, with his reflective vaporwave and his recent radio experiments. But unlike the paranoid, phantom musique of the Safdie brothers’ ally, that of No Bad Memories fully surrenders to this gentle alienation. For better and for worse.
With the participation of Khadija Al Hanafi, Karen O, or Rivers Cuomo
Spangled with azimuthal interludes as if they were jingles seeping into our more or less buried memories, this fourth album continually urges us to buy wholeheartedly into its pastiches, its evanescent joys, and the potential fascination of its advertising tunes.
That is at once the beauty and the limit of these tracks that are almost too pretty to be true and of this gargantuan work. Unfortunately, Vida, Magic Wand, Can’t Get Over Losing You or Our Love Is Alive seem completely corrupted by their sugary advertising enrobing.
Yet, when Khadija Al Hanafi propels The Avalanches’ music into jersey club or drum’n’bass with John Glacier, when Karen O belts out heartbreak on Blue Shadows, when Panda Bear’s neo-psychedelia roars at full tilt, or when Rivers Cuomo is thrust into a chillwave-leaning anthem (All the Time in the World, with Vegyn and Baby Marlboro), the three Australians discover an enchanting equilibrium that lets their Technicolor world come to life.
No Bad Memories (Modular Recordings/Polydor/Universal). Out October 16.
