We WIll Always Love You - The Avalanches: Review
are an Australian trio most well known for their heavy use of sampling and their critically acclaimed 2000 album Since I Left You. The band waited 16 years to follow the record up with the feature heavy Wildflower in 2016 and have thankfully taken a shorter turnaround releasing this, their 3rd album, 20 years after Since I Left You.
Review By Lav:
I love The Avalanches. I have loved Since I Left You since I first heard it sometime around 10 years ago and I was thrilled to see the band return on Wildflower which I also thoroughly enjoyed. Despite my love of the bands work I wasn't expecting quite as much from this record. The primary reasons being that it was less sample based than either of their first two projects and I thought the singles leading up to the album were a bit of a mixed bunch despite some major highlights. As it turns out there are still plenty of samples used perfectly all over the record, the original instrumentals are used to craft a tight sonic theme throughout the albums runtime, and most importantly every single one of the singles sounds better in the context of the record than it did alone. Looking at it retroactively this should have come as no surprise to me, but We Will Always Love You is one of the best records I've heard in 2020.
We Will Always Love You was the first taste of the record earlier this year as a spacey cut blending a Smokey Robinson sample with some spoken word from Blood Orange. Dev also lends his vocals to a shimmering hook and while this was never my favorite single from the record I think it's an awesome first step for the record and I like it more in context than I did by itself. This track is followed by The Divine Cloud a track that has two of the most eye turning features in the entire tracklist pulling MGMT and The Smith's guitarist Johnny Marr. The song is an absolutely blissful psychedelic jam that sort of foregoes a conventional hook in favor of a wordy but completely intoxicating refrain the song revisits twice. I think as an artistic decision this qualifies as genius because it wraps up the song in a tight 3 minutes with a nonstop assault of blissful sensations that I can't get enough of.
Interstellar Love sounds so much better in the context of the record than it did as a single. The shimmering sample on the hook is just a sheer sweet bliss and Leon Bridges performance perfectly walks the fragile line of beauty the album has set up with its first few tracks. Reflecting Light continues this strong soul flavor with singer Sananda Maitreya and a rich array of instrumentation including synths and sampling that aren't afraid to be strikingly loud at points. It pays homage to old soul and maintains the records spacey lovestruck aesthetic. Oh The Sunn! is a surprise track with soul influence and an almost disco edge featuring Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell of all people. Somehow his distinctive vocals work really well flying into the mix over the sampled choir vocals. The song is a short but sweet and groovy moment and one of the records many unique spots.
Given how much I enjoy many of the shorter interlude style tracks on the album it's safe to say that two of my least favorite tracks on the record pop up back to back around the midpoint. We Go On grabs Mick Jones of The Clash to pair alongside an artist called Cola Boyy that I'm not familiar with and the results are interesting for sure. It's one of the more cluttered tracks in terms of refrains which isn't always the best and Cola Boyy's kind of nasally vocals aren't great. The song is sort of saved by a wonderful instrumental and lyrics that fit the records conscious sense of togetherness put on display through the lyrics. Until Daylight Comes recruits Tricky for one of the records more abstract statements. Once again the instrumental leaves a lot of space for the vocals to just fly away in the mix and the result is a song that's slightly unsettling and makes intimacy somehow feel distant.
The record picks and never lets go from this point on starting with Wherever You Go a song I loved from the moment I first heard it as a single and it still sounds great here. It's an intricate evolving song about space and aliens that features a rich array of samples or influential people and leads into a Jamie xx house beat. From that point on it's a catchy and fiery explosion of cosmological dance music that is absolutely awesome. Music Makes Me High is one of the funkiest songs on the record with a slick bassline and some bumping percussion. The Avalanches do what they always do and turn a seemingly random sample into an incredible soaring hook and make yet another highlight. Take Care In Your Dreaming is a track that kicks off like a dreamy synth pop number before introducing some rattling trap drums and all of a sudden you've got Denzel Curry and Sampa The Great on your hands. The blending of sounds is classic Avalanches and so is recruiting two great features and making it all work together perfectly. Overcome is another genuinely inspiring blend of blissful sounds and lyrical positivity. The song doesn't demand to be anything more than this and it works wonderfully as a supporting piece of the records themes and it transitions perfectly in and out of the tracks around it.
Gold Sky was a big surprise because I'm not the biggest Kurt Vile fan in the world but his performance here is absolute perfection. He channels folk singers of old as he rumbles through some existential but definitive ramblings over a chorus of shimmering vocal samples. It's something that in paper I would never think would work but the execution here is fantastic. I had also been thinking throughout the entire record that The Flaming lips must have been an influence and sure enough Wayne Coyne's vocals show up in the back end of this song. Always Black is a lowkey hip hop piano ballad that shows off Pink Siifu at his most meditative. While the second half of the track is a touch slow I still find myself enjoying it a lot every time I listen to it. Running Red Lights is one of my favorite songs of the year coming into the record and like all the other singles I love it even more in context. Rivers Cuomo was an absolutely perfect choice for the poppy and slightly lucid vocal refrains which combines with the instrumental for one of the catchiest and most blissful songs I've heard in 2020. Pink Siifu returns on the back end of the song with a mysterious spoke word verse that wraps it up perfectly.
The records final trio of tracks are perhaps it's most abstract but they also bring some of the records key themes to a conclusion. Born To Lose is a glistening instrumental cut with hints of Daft Punkian electronica and vocal samples weaved in and out of the track. It's a catchy refreshing track with a clear vibe and effective energy. Music Is The Light is a track that features Cornelius and Kelly Moran which has got to be a pretty thin group of people aware of both artists and excited for the crossover but here we are. Instrumentally it's one of the more off kilter songs here at least in the first half but once the title refrain enters and the static blips lay a thin fuzz over everything it starts to feel perfectly aligned with the other tracks here. The closing track Weightless is easy to ignore if you don't realize that the songs blips are borrowed from the morse code message sent out into space in the 70's featuring a bunch of information about earth and human . This combined with Orono returning to close her side story and make direct reference to the Golden Record it spends the last two minutes of the album tying up the themes and storylines of the record.
I can't decide what's a bigger triumph of We Will Always Love You. On one hand The Avalanches have put together their most conceptual record yet using both lyrical and sonic elements to paint a vivid picture of their perspective on the vastness of space and galaxies as well as the intimacy of interpersonal relations. On the other hand the band has also assembled a set of tracks with remarkably high quality. There are no real duds on this record despite a brief stumble or two and the tracklist has as many soaring highs as any project the band has put out to date. There's very little of anything I can say I didn't enjoy about this album and absolutely nothing that I outright hated. For a record with such consistently excellent songwriting to also serve such a tangible concept with compelling elements throughout is a remarkable achievement that is certain to go down as one of my favorite records of the year. 9.5/10
Album Cover Review By Tyler Judson:
I like this cover a lot. I love the distortion of the image and the idea of the image being made through the use of a spectograph. It gives the cover more personality that relates back to the music in the album. The color is nicely saturated and not overpowering and the image itself is simple. It doesn't need any text it that could take away from the small details inside. 7/10
For more conceptual records check out my review of Liturgy's Origin Of The Alimonies here
