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Music

So, Is The Avalanches' New Album 'Wildflower' Any Good?

We spent 16 years waiting for 'Wildflower' and now that it's finally here, we ask the tough question: Does it suck, or is it legendary?

“When you know how a magic trick is done, it’s so depressing.” That’s Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk in conversation with Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal in 2013, and it’s a quote I’ve been thinking about a lot while listening to The Avalanches’ first LP in 16 years, Wildflower. The 2010s have seen a plethora of reclusive or creatively dormant types, from My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields to Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum to D’Angelo, return from perceived or literal abysses. You can add the Avalanches to that perpetually growing list, too—an Australian DJ/production collective whose nearly total silence since their debut, 2001’s classic Since I Left You, contributed a mythic aura to their long absence.

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So the arrival of Wildflower serves to shatter that aura, and not just in existence alone. Interviews with the group’s remaining members, Robbie Chater and Tony DiBlasi, have revealed a short grocery list of reasons why it took so long to follow up Since I Left You—a bout of autoimmune disease, sample clearance issues, departing bandmates, the oft-cited perfectionism, and the fact that they didn’t really start working on it seriously until around 2011. For anyone who bought into the years of message-board mythmaking and industry whispers surrounding the Avalanches’ absence—guilty as charged—the truth ended up being a bit, well, unsurprising.

Surprise was a key element in the success of Since I Left You, a richly detailed album that, after countless front-to-back listens and nearly two decades in front of it, still possesses the ability to make listeners sit up straight at any given moment and exclaim, “Wow!” It’s easier to describe the album’s moving parts—tons of samples stitched and blended by way of old-fashioned vinyl crate-digging and Y2K-era technological advances—than it is to pin down what, exactly, to call it. Ascribing genre to Since I Left You is like trying to describe how colors taste: it’s a subjective exercise that, if you devote enough time to trying to pin it down, will leave you utterly exhausted by its impossibilities.

It is very easy, on the other hand, to describe what Wildflower sounds like. A pastoral, gently trippy travelogue, the Avalanches’ second proper LP explicitly takes the shape of three different eras of psychedelia: the swirling guitar pop of the 60s, Prince Paul’s giggly mischief-making make in the late 80s and early 90s, and the foggy retro-indie established by Athens, Georgia’s Elephant Six collective in the late 90s. Since I Left You took a hodgepodge of older sounds—spanning from Madonna to lounge’s tacky, velvet confines—to fashion something unfamiliar; Wildflower takes older sounds to make an album that sounds like watching American Graffiti on a 4K TV. It’s vibrant and extremely high-definition—but it’s still old. Sounding “old” isn’t a bad thing, granted—but placed next to Since I Left You’s still-fresh spirit, Wildflower can’t help but sound like someone else’s faded memory.

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Various permutations of the past run through Wildflower’s paisley field. Alongside current-gen artists like Father John Misty’s Josh Tillman, Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick (whose “If I Was a Folkstar” is a jangly, understated highlight on the album), and Danny Brown, many of Wildflower’s contributors are still-active relics of earlier musical eras (Biz Markie, Camp Lo, Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue) or nostalgic fabulists in their own right (Royal Trux’s Jennifer Herrema, Ariel Pink).

The presence of original vocals is perhaps the only “new” aspect of Wildflower, and I’m not sure it’s a welcome change. Part of what makes the Avalanches’ sampladelic formula successful is the way certain samples jump out in the mix, like flipping through a pop-up book; one of Wildflower’s most ear-catching instances of this phenomenon is smack dab in the middle of LP single “Subways,” when the vocal-chant earworm of The Bar-Kays’ “Sang and Dance” is thrown into the fray with showy flair. With few exceptions, none of Wildflower’s guest vocalists sound bad, per se—but they don’t add anything but more noise, either, making for the first time in the Avalanches’ albeit brief discography where breeziness gives way to claustrophobia.

About those exceptions: the Avalanches have previously incorporated hip-hop as part of their sound—the genre is practically the bedrock for turntablism, a scratch-focused aesthetic movement that the Avalanches are often (and questionably) affiliated with. But Wildflower’s excursions into straight hip-hop fall flat, serving as disruptions on an album that mostly and successfully coasts on a pleasing, unassuming wavelength.

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The Danny Brown-featuring “Frankie Sinatra” is an annoying carnival-barker anthem that sounds ripped from the Big Beat era of the mid-to-late 90s (as Wildflower’s lead single, it also served as a very Avalanches-y red herring that suggested the album would be much worse than it turned out); Biz Markie’s gourmand-braggadocio on “The Noisy Eater” doesn’t fare better, a goofy mid-album cacophony that’s reminiscent of the literal car-crash “Mashin’ on the Motorway,” from DJ Shadow’s 2002 effort The Private Press. And for all of the callbacks to the past contained within Wildflower, The Private Press is perhaps the album’s true spiritual kin: both are long-awaited follow-ups to classic sample-based debuts (The Private Press saw release six years after the astounding Entroducing…) that incorporate vocals with varied effect.

The Private Press isn’t a bad album, but I can’t imagine a day in my life where I’m reaching for it instead of Entroducing…, and as much as I’ve waited for the day in which the Avalanches would return, I’m not sure how often I’ll be reaching for Wildflower, too. It’s a very nice, impeccably arranged album that has a few unbelievable peaks—”Folkstar,” “Subways,” and a back-half stretch that briefly flirts with Boards of Canada’s oscillating-fan drone—but I’m finding it hard to get excited by its relative complacency compared to Since I Left You.

And it’s in this capacity that a record like Wildflower—a heavily anticipated record long shrouded in mystery that follows up after one of the century’s most mind-blowing albums—never stood a chance to begin with. The weight of expectation has crushed many a lesser band, and in that light it is a wonder that Wildflower isn’t the absolute disaster it very well could’ve been. Perhaps the lesson to take away from the Avalanches’ pleasant, soothing, and relatively unexciting return is that we could all stand to apply better management to our expectations at large: after all, it’s still impressive when someone pulls off a magic trick twice, but it’s unfair to expect the trick to be as effective the second time around.

Larry Fitzmaurice waited a really long time to write this essay. Follow him on Twitter.

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