THE AVALANCHES 

2020 PSYCHEDELIC SAMPLE POP/DISCO/NEO-SOUL

We Will Always Love You is the third full length release from Australian sample fiends The Avalanches; who initially rose to fame via their completely wild and incredible debut record Since I Left You in 2000. A wall to wall psychedelic pop extravaganza made nearly all out of sampled material; now widely considered a modern classic. After over a decade and a half of constant rumors surrounding a new LP they finally dropped their follow-up Wildflower and much to my surprise after such a length of time it was a delightful sequel that stayed true to the spirit of their debut while managing to sound as cutting edge as its predecessor did. We Will Always Love You is a big departure for the band for a few reasons. There are substantially less samples, a few will anchor a track down but the remainder is provided by instrumentals and features from other artists. The songs are all poppy like prior releases but it is much less fun, trading crowded kaleidoscopic freak-outs for smooth soul infused and frustratingly straight forward disco.

But the most significant change on We Will Always Love You is that it fucking sucks, that’s right, these crass words are necessary to describe the listening experience of this slop. This record is an hour and eleven minutes long, and on every sit down with it I would lose my will to continue at several points, desperately trying to quickly think of an excuse to do anything else. It is an unbelievable bore, dead-end track after dead-end track that are criminally uninspired. The album opens with two sub two minute long ambient pieces, the first with a very vague spoken word sample about missing someone who is far away and the second with a slightly touched up soul vocal, neither goes anywhere.

The title track is the first real song, a basic drum beat and a few ambient synth notes make up most of the song, there are a few different vocals, including forgettable samples, a clunky and brief rap verse, choral vocals from children, and added vocals from Blood Orange come on with twinkling keys to form a work that is simultaneous anemic and outdated. The Divine Chord sounds like the band trying to go back to creating the infectious upbeat style they were previously known for but without any of the character and with a fraction of the effort featuring a buried pathetic hook and lots of funky colorful notes that manage to be incredibly bland. Upon closer inspection of the track listing there are features from both psych-pop darlings MGMT and rock legend Johnny Marr, but both are so inconsequential that I either forgot or simply never noticed. Interstellar Love flops about in its hand clapping feel good pastiche with reverb soaked vocals that are lackluster as all else; it kills the memorability of the tune. At eight tracks in, there have already been four quick interlude songs that are honest to god filler. Nothing added to the mood, no sonic break in the action, a total waste.

Reflecting Light is the first song that really piques interest; the cute backing vocals and charismatic delivery from Sanada Maitreya combine together well, although the Vashti Bunyan sample is a bit underdeveloped. There are a bunch of samples that range from good to obnoxious including a piercing whistle that is extremely grating, as a whole it ends up being just okay and it’s the best this album has to offer. Danceable disco vibes strut about on Oh The Sunn with even more child choral vocals but it ducks out so quickly that it doesn’t have time to blossom, perhaps that is for the best but this effort desperately needs anything to go right. We Go On has a satisfying sampled hook in addition to an instrumental with dazzling keys and rich synths but the features on this song are downright annoying, flat phoned in lines and a delivery like he is pinching his nose to make the most grating nasal inflection possible.

A plethora of ideas are thrown into Wherever You Go but it can’t figure out which one to stick to and flesh out appropriately, it shifts awkwardly into sections that for the most part I enjoy except for the rap verse at the end that is so high in the mix and lays down cringey platitudes bar after bar. The band takes a hard right straight into hip hop with Care In Your Dreaming. Denzel Curry and others spit bars rapidly on top of a lavish trap instrumental, on another album this would be fine but it’s shockingly out of place here. The production is serviceable and the samples are fine apart from a sudden one corny snippet from a cartoon near the end that makes absolutely no sense sonically. I genuinely think it was accidentally included. Gold Sky is laugh out loud funny, Kurt Vile is speaking in mostly spoken-word with all the vigor of a hungover teen droning out a book report. Afterwards there is a short interlude that has Karen O covered in reverb repeating lines from Darkness and Cold by Purple Mountains, it takes beautiful lyrics off of another song and expects it to work in this context but it doesn’t, its borderline insulting and it shows up on the next track, Running Red Lights, to really let the listener know that this album has no idea what it’s doing. Other than that the song is fairly charming with a catchy chorus but nothing particularly standout besides the Rivers Cuomo lyric that goes “I’m ready to burst, like Schrödinger”, its the kind of idiotic line that distracts you for the remainder of the runtime trying to think how this random “intellectual” name drop makes any sense.

The album rounds itself out with Born To Lose which starts with some reverbed out keys that remind me of something off of a Candy Claws record that transforms into a bad house track that stalls out and overstays its welcome at an arbitrary five minutes. Music Is The Light is a little slow track that radiates an icy coolness. The Cornelius feature is perfect for the mood as the music sways its shoulders in unison, enjoyable but a mere blip on the sonic map. The closer, Weightless, is a throwaway that is made up entirely of annoying bleeps that I suppose sound like Morse code and might have a deeper meaning but as a listening experience it’s perplexing and plain irritating. I found it difficult to write this review simply because We Will Always Love You is an unremarkable waste of time, it’s over an hour of filler that is not worth discussion and when discussion is required it results in utter aggravation. It’s painful to see a group such as The Avalanches who have reached such ecstatic creative highs stoop to this low of an artistic watermark. 

3/10

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