The Avalanches
Wildflower

A couple of months ago, sixteen years after that album brimming with danceable beauty that is Since I Left You, the new single from the Avalanches was released.
With eager anticipation filled with generally shared hopes [hype], we listen to this Frankie Sinatra. Finally, oh god how beautiful, but do you think album of the year?, but should we organize a listening party?, bring some wine and comfortable shoes, I'll set up the speakers and the room, who knows what they have conjured up after all this time...

[if you're listening too, now for the first time, it's about four minutes of ellipses]

...aaaaaah, 'na crap. So: let's remember that electro swing is a plague to be eradicated.
But then what is this thing that sounds like Out of the Tunnel pt.2 with the chorus that is a sample of rare ennui; with Danny Brown and (damn) MF Doom, no less, who would have been less wasted playing left-back for Inter? Are these really the Avalanches? What's happening down there in Australia?
Luckily, the listening party didn't happen, because for four minutes it wouldn't really have made much sense and we would have ended up with out of the tun-nellellellel of fun-o-o-o and doing drunk re-evaluations of Caparezza's discography. It would have been even worse than attending an electro swing DJ set, at least there you can always get a good groove on.

A month passes. At an electro swing evening, I see an Arab girl with a raised burka making out with a guy on the dance floor. I swear on all the children I almost had.

The album comes out, but no listening party this time. It's around July and it's unbearably hot. In the summer session, I am reaping the rotten fruits of the seeds of evil that I scattered in months spent doing who knows what. For a few days, I've been wandering naked around the house cursing the sun and all the beautiful things of creation. I don't live alone.

[followed by two more paragraphs of purely autobiographical notes, only meant to reiterate the concept of black mood with evil and sometimes violent twists]

An initial skit and then Because I'm Me and woooo damn here they are, our two producers of Christ, welcome back you and your superior taste in sample selection, your indisputable mastery in assembling bass and strings to create that timeless dance soul. Always synthetic, yet never cold.
So, you take the Six Boys In Trouble, easy to sample, to build a chorus of childish black melancholy on a Want Ads track, pumped up like only the best live sets. Then you call up Camp Lo who in a few words construct the perfect crossover verse. It turns into a miraculous track, one of those that if you don't shake your booty, you don't have a booty; but surely you at least move your head and shoulders and feel quite good about yourself.

†then Frankie Sinatra kicks in†

Subway is an utterly mighty house, extremely dense. With a dark core. With a bass that makes you want to sell your most precious things to buy more watts. And that little keyboard riff that where the hell did you get it, I want to listen to it for hours. Strings that grab your soul, voices that come in and perform a psychedelic dance of spirits conjured by the sampler: welcome back, Gibb brothers.

The novelty, compared to Since I Left You, is that Wildflower is not entirely plunderphonics, because there are original additions: that is, there are those who sing and rap original things over sampled bases. This does not detract from the beauty of the result, in fact, it enriches it. Take especially If I Was a Folkstar, the 2016 summer song by Miki Nigagi. But also Colours, which follows it. The many more or less famous artists who participated did a great job: a choral contribution to an album that overall borders on splendor.
The vocal line of Toro Y Moi in If I Was a Folkstar is one of those colorful kaleidoscope things; drawn-out, mystical, sunny, and perfect. On a track that has that transparency in the use of samples for which you might say ah, easy, you have fun dissecting it with your right and left ear, but deep down you know that to create an original composition from such fragmented and hybrid materials, it requires superior musical talent. Listen to If I Was a Folkstar, please, and tell me when Kip Kasper, KLON Radio comes, you don't feel a little less alone in the world.

Livin' Underwater I'd like to dance it embraced with the person I care about; but it's a slow song that even if it has a cinematic imprint, sounds not at all tacky and transitions into The Wozard Of Iz. My god, The Wozard Of Iz is everything we can ask from trip-hop. Choruses that explain catchy better than any definition, languid female vocals, flutes, basses everywhere, sudden overflows on orchestrations, strings, more flutes. Pervasive symptoms of horror vacui.

Have I already mentioned it's a miraculous album? That to return after sixteen years and still sound so fresh and classy, you need to be a bit of a genius?
It's electronic music with a thousand moods, for people who dance with very big hearts in their chests.