THE AVALANCHES, Since I Left You
Uncut, 2001
by Simon Reynolds
You should hear the things people say about The Avalanches: "Basement Jaxx meets the Beta Band," "Stardust crossed with Stereolab," sample-based music with the freshness of Foxbase Alpha and the playful wit of 3 Feet High and Rising. With such mouthwatering parallels bandied around, you're almost set up to be underwhelmed by this Australian outfit's debut. Amazingly, Since I Left You lives up to the hype. At the end, you feel dazed and bemused, partly because you're concussed by its tumultuous on-rush of non-stop brilliance, but also because it's hard to put your finger on why the Avalanches are so special, so different.
It's not that there's anything unusual about the group's modus operandi (the album was assembled out of samples from 600 records scavenged during 18 months of field research in second-hand vinyl shops). Wagon Christ's Luke Vibert is no slouch at alchemizing stale cheese into soulful gold and even claims to prefer "shit records" as sample-sources; Bentley Rhythm Ace scour car boot sales for kitschadelic treasure; electronic jesters V/Vm bulk-buy unsellable CD singles and hilariously deface the oeuvres of Shakin' Stevens and Russ Abbott. Nor is it the case that Avalanches do anything especially complicated or technically advanced with their raw material: they loop the samples, layer the loops, drop them in and out of the mix, twist them into strange little riffs. So why is Since I Left You such a relentless loop-da-loop rollercoaster of thrills? Could it be because the group's delight at the sonic jetsam they've salvaged is palpable in every bar of the record? (You can just imagine the exultant whoops when they unearthed the soundbites about a chap called Dexter--same name as the Avalanches singer--who's "criminally insane" and "needs therapy"). Or is it just the sheer un-restraint and gratuitous generosity with which they pile it all on thick?.
Composed out of approximately one thousand "good bits" from other records, Since I Left You rarely feels bitty. The Avalanches's forte isn't technical so much as the art of listening and spotting compatibilities between disparate sounds. For it's one thing to take three or four sampled elements and make them work together, and quite another to take twenty or fifty (which is what many songs here sound like) and making them mesh them together as a plausible, integrated composition (while still retaining that uncanny sampladelic see-the-joins quality). Drawing on exotica, surf music, animal noises, film scores, Francoise Hardy-style Gallic girl-pop, and chartpop from the last five decades, Since hits hardest in the tingly treble zone: your ears are dazzled by acoustic guitars, Radio 2 strings, flute-twirls, harp-ripples, piano trills, dulcet snippets of la-la-la-ing female vocal, tinkling vibes, twinkling electric piano, bursts of heavenly choir. Into this wafts explosions of merriment, dinner table hubbub, football terrace fervor, foghorn blasts, and glorious non-sequiturs like "he also made false teeth." Gorgeously goofy hookphrases like "I got the bubbly/bubbling through me" pop to the surface, momentarily crystallising the music's effervescence. "Tonight", one of the few downtempo lulls, sounds like a Shirley Bassey ballad played on badly warped vinyl. And if tunes like "Frontier Psychiatry" (the one with the Dexter-is-a-loony samples) and "Flight Tonight" verge on Big Beat wackiness, others, like "Etoh" and "Summer Crane," evoke near-mystical feelings of tenderness and rejoicing, sensations of existensial buoyancy and the dizzy bliss that ensues when you lose count of your blessings.
Since I Left You is experienced as one long flow. Structurally (its onion-skin layers of crescendo, the absence of gaps between tracks) and emotionally (an almost painfully plangent euphoria) the record it reminds me most of is Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. But really The Avalanches are the southern hemisphere's Daft Punk. Since I Left You makes a superb companion to the latter's own kitschadelic masterpiece Discovery. If the French house maestros have a slight edge it's only because their own particular brand of cheese---the Seventies shlock-rock of ELO, Frampton, 10 CC, Buggles--is slightly more unusual and piquant than Avalanches's EZ-listening and novelty pop. But unless we're very lucky and other contenders miraculously enter the fray, it'll be these two jostling for Best Dance Album 2001 at year's end.
THE AVALANCHES, Since I Left You
Spin, 2001
by Simon Reynolds
When it comes to music, misery has a monopoly on credibility (just ask Thom and Trent), and a furrowed brow and tormented soul are essential if you aspire to "deep". "Happy" is a tough act to pull off without seemingly smugly serene (post-Astral Weeks Van Morrison, say), irritatingly jaunty, or simply simpleminded. There are exceptions, of course--Al Green, Brian Wilson, most Krautrock. Now Australian dance six-piece The Avalanches join this illustrious company. Just as the Eskimos have 30 words for different kinds of snow, The Avalanches revel in a thousand subtle shades of joy.
Dance music's own version of "deep" is the way connoisseurs use "dark" as a term of approval. "Dark" typically refers to genres where bass frequencies dominate and treble's been purged (along with melody, the human voice, and general pleasantness). On Since, by contrast, you barely notice the basslines (except when the groove from Madonna's "Holiday" frolics into the fray), while the pounding house beat is more rudimentary than even Daft Punk's. Instead, the Avalanches sound is all about the high end: swirling strings, spangly harps, billowing flutes, twinkly trickles of electric piano, dulcet feminine harmonies, plus the occasional male vocal pitched up to sound angelic. This densely layered cornucopia of radiance and rhapsody (a 1000 samples from around 600 records) is the result of a year spent combing Sydney's thrift-stores for used vinyl. On tracks like ""Two Hearts In 3/4 Time" and "A Different Feeling", the Avalanches tweeter assault resembles Stereolab's Francophile EZ listening crossed with Stardust's French filter disco. Treble not only evokes light, it creates lightheadedness. Since makes you feel dizzy, fizzy inside---a champagne-for-blood sensation captured on "Diners Only" with its catchy whispered chant "got the bubbly/bubbling through me/sparkling sparkling".
With no gaps between its eighteen tracks, just a non-stop groove, Since I Left You is so madly glad, it's demented. But it's not all relentless rejoicing. There are exquisite bittersweet tints to tracks like "Etoh", a sense of heartbursting euphoria shadowed by the intimation that all things must pass. And the downtempo "Tonight" is almost blue. But glumness is instantly banished by the following "Frontier Psychiatry", a Big Beaty jape dotted with wacky soundbites like "that boy needs therapy" and "he also made false teeth." "Summer Crane" ripples religiously like Steve Reich on X. As its title hints, the album's underlying concept is about unburdening yourself--shedding the dead weight of personal history, cutting loose the ties that hold you back, floating off to some exotic elsewhere, or into the ecstatic ether. ("You can book a flight tonight" goes one sample, which could refer to taking a vacation, or a drug). Gravity, in every sense, is abolished. The Avalanches ethos is a sort of positive irresponsibility, dereliction as a duty you owe yourself.
"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
"
DAFT PUNK, Human After All
director's cut, Blender, 2005
by Simon Reynolds
For every great band, there’s a moment of optimum ripeness, the point at which they deserve to conquer the world. Daft Punk reached it with 2001’s Discovery, on which they deliciously wove elements of Seventies FM radio soft-rock into their trademark French disco-house. The result was beauties like “One More Time" (electronica’s “More Than A Feeling”, a hymn to the redemptive power of music itself) and “Digital Love” (this decade’s most poignant love song so far). By rights Discovery should have shifted Thriller-level quantities, but instead it sold a merely decent half-million in America. After such a (relative) rebuff, even the most fanatical sonic visionaries might find it hard to muster renewed passion for the aesthetic battle. Sadly, the most powerful sensation emitted by Human After All is of a group going through the motions. Everything burstingly ecstatic and open-hearted about Discovery has been replaced by an archly ironic dance-rock that feels desultory and numb verging on autistic. It’s as if the duo--Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo--have retreated into their studio playpen to lick their wounds.
Discovery alchemized its shlocky sources (ELO, Supertramp, Van Halen) to achieve a splendor of sound that felt almost religious. This time round, the endless vocoderized man-machine vocals feel about as fresh as a post-Comes Alive Frampton album,. The clipped and clinical-sounding guitar riffs distil the air-punching aggression of a thousand sports stadium anthems and the four-square beats are about as funky as The Scorpions. When Daft Punk do come up with a great lick--“Robot Rock,” “Television Rules The Nation”--they don’t go anywhere with it, just wear out its welcome through deadening reiteration.
Human After All does improve with repeated listens. Every track contains a couple of cool sounds (often strange metallic gurgles like a cyborg with indigestion). “Steam Machine” is so plodding and cumbersome, its ugliness becomes strangely compelling. “The Brainwasher” raises a smile with its opening parody of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.” “Technologic” cleverly replicates the neurotic restlessness of the computer age with its looped vocal running through the endless options that “enhance” our lives: “plug it, play it, burn it, rip it, drag and drop it, zip - unzip it,” ad infinitum.
Revealingly, though, the most endearing track is the least robo-rockin’. With its mellow piano and idyllic guitar-picking conjuring a mood of sensuality tinged with sadness, “Make Love” could almost be a Bruce Hornsby loop. It’s the only time this album approaches the bittersweet bliss of its predecessor Discovery. Mostly, Human After All is the proverbial diminished return. If you’re already a fan, you’ll most likely learn to love this album. But once upon a time Daft Punk looked like it was going to be so much more than merely a cult band.
"
DAFT PUNK, Human After All
director's cut, Blender, 2005
by Simon Reynolds
For every great band, there’s a moment of optimum ripeness, the point at which they deserve to conquer the world. Daft Punk reached it with 2001’s Discovery, on which they deliciously wove elements of Seventies FM radio soft-rock into their trademark French disco-house. The result was beauties like “One More Time" (electronica’s “More Than A Feeling”, a hymn to the redemptive power of music itself) and “Digital Love” (this decade’s most poignant love song so far). By rights Discovery should have shifted Thriller-level quantities, but instead it sold a merely decent half-million in America. After such a (relative) rebuff, even the most fanatical sonic visionaries might find it hard to muster renewed passion for the aesthetic battle. Sadly, the most powerful sensation emitted by Human After All is of a group going through the motions. Everything burstingly ecstatic and open-hearted about Discovery has been replaced by an archly ironic dance-rock that feels desultory and numb verging on autistic. It’s as if the duo--Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo--have retreated into their studio playpen to lick their wounds.
Discovery alchemized its shlocky sources (ELO, Supertramp, Van Halen) to achieve a splendor of sound that felt almost religious. This time round, the endless vocoderized man-machine vocals feel about as fresh as a post-Comes Alive Frampton album,. The clipped and clinical-sounding guitar riffs distil the air-punching aggression of a thousand sports stadium anthems and the four-square beats are about as funky as The Scorpions. When Daft Punk do come up with a great lick--“Robot Rock,” “Television Rules The Nation”--they don’t go anywhere with it, just wear out its welcome through deadening reiteration.
Human After All does improve with repeated listens. Every track contains a couple of cool sounds (often strange metallic gurgles like a cyborg with indigestion). “Steam Machine” is so plodding and cumbersome, its ugliness becomes strangely compelling. “The Brainwasher” raises a smile with its opening parody of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.” “Technologic” cleverly replicates the neurotic restlessness of the computer age with its looped vocal running through the endless options that “enhance” our lives: “plug it, play it, burn it, rip it, drag and drop it, zip - unzip it,” ad infinitum.
Revealingly, though, the most endearing track is the least robo-rockin’. With its mellow piano and idyllic guitar-picking conjuring a mood of sensuality tinged with sadness, “Make Love” could almost be a Bruce Hornsby loop. It’s the only time this album approaches the bittersweet bliss of its predecessor Discovery. Mostly, Human After All is the proverbial diminished return. If you’re already a fan, you’ll most likely learn to love this album. But once upon a time Daft Punk looked like it was going to be so much more than merely a cult band.
"
Monday, February 25, 2008
LO-FIDELITY ALLSTARS
director's cut, New York Times, March 7, 1999
by Simon Reynolds
Big Beat, a boisterous hybrid of hip hop and house music, is currently the most popular dance sound in Britain. The genre's leading artist, Fatboy Slim just scored a UK number one single with "Praise You". And although Big Beat has yet to make its commercial breakthrough into the American pop charts, you can already hear the music in countless television commercials and on movie soundtracks ( Fatboy Slim's other big hit "The Rockafeller Skank" is featured in both She's All That and Office Space, while "Praise You" appears in the forthcoming Cruel Intentions). Big Beat works well in TV ads and Hollywood movies because it's good times music, peppy and upbeat. It's also catchy as hell, sampling hooks and riffs from early rap, disco, raunchy arena rock and Sixties frat-party sounds such as garage punk and surf.
Because of the genre's retro-nuevo aura, even Big Beat's fiercest supporters admit that it's not especially original, innovative or intelligent. Yet the music made by Lo-Fidelity Allstars--who emerged from the Big Beat scene and share the same UK label, Skint Records, with Fatboy Slim--exhibits all three of these attributes. The band's debut album How To Operate With A Blown Mind (Columbia) exudes a harrowed and haunted atmosphere strikingly at odds with big beat's cheery rumpus. Where a producer like Norman Cook of Fatboy Slim lifts samples from old school Eighties rap and disco for their tried-and-tested crowd-pleasing power, Lo-Fidelity Allstars's sonic plundering achieves a more poignant effect. The band's dense mish-mash of samples--which encompass Eartha Kitt, James Last, Rick James, Lalo Schifrin, and The Three Degrees, among many others--conjures a sense of contemporary pop consciousness as polluted by the past, infected by nostalgia for eras never directly experienced.
Lo-Fidelity Allstars call their style "punk paste," shorthand for a merger of rock attack with the cut-and-paste techniques of DJ-driven genres like hip hop and house. The word "paste" actually works even better as a tag for the way the band transcend mere eclecticism and blend its diverse sources into a lumpy but distinctive puree. Partly this stems from the fact that the Allstars are a proper band capable of performing live onstage, rather than a solitary DJ/producer making records at home using a computer. Lo-Fidelity Allstars also write songs with lyrics, rather than tracks peppered with sampled vocal hooks (as is the case with most big beat).
Vocalist Dave Randall-- who quit the band shortly before the delayed US release of the album--belongs to the English lineage of technically limited but charismatic "non-singers" that includes Public Image Ltd's John Lydon, The Fall's Mark E. Smith and Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays. Like Smith and Ryder, Randall sings in a baleful, bilious drawl and pens imagistic, cut-up lyrics. The album's title track, for instance, is a stream of semi-consciousness that vividly evokes drifting disorientated through the squalor and sensory overload of small hours London: "the air's alive with daggers and poisons... severe mental fog... the man's a monster in his own time... hydra-headed fear is all around here."
Often, it's hard to decipher what Randall's ranting about, because his voice is distorted through studio effects, making it sound like a megaphone, or stretching out the final syllable of a line into a distended smear. In fact, most of the instrumental sounds on the album--cantakerous basslines, bubbling clavinet synths, chickenscratch guitar riffs--are warped, contorted, and fuzzed-up. Lo-Fidelity Allstars's music flirts with chaos but never succumbs to it, echoing the old Public Enemy aesthetic ideal of hip hop as "organised noise". Indeed, The Allstars proclaim their affiliation to old school rap by using scratching, electro-style drum machine rhythms, and samples from Eric B & Rakim, Just Ice and Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force. Randall's sung-spoken delivery could be heard as a uniquely English form of rapping.
Ultimately, though, Lo-Fidelity Allstars are shaped more by British rave than American rap. Song titles like "Blisters On My Brain" and "How To Operate With A Blown Mind" suggest that Randall is drawing on inside knowledge when he documents the darkside of the dance-and-drug lifestyle. A glitterball surge of disco percussion and synths, "Blisters" sees him gibbering about "injecting a rush/sniffing lunar dust" and getting "scrambled" on the illegal stimulant Ecstasy. Long term, excessive hedonism can lead to paranoia and burn-out, a state of mindwrecked confusion and numb despondency gestured at in the album closer "Nightime", where the singer wonders "What's it all gonna mean/When audio psychosis spills from the speaker's cones/And you can hear the music tear/Tearing through your bones?". If you've spent the night partying like there's no tomorrow, what happens when tomorrow inevitably arrives? If you can't somehow integrate the blissed-out utopianism of the rave dancefloor into everyday life, you return to a reality that only feels even bleaker than before. Lo-Fidelity Allstars don't have any answers to these quandaries, with which many of their generation are now grappling. But the band's turbulent sound and dark vision indicate a path beyond the impasses that have stalled dance culture in its tracks these last few years.
director's cut, New York Times, March 7, 1999
by Simon Reynolds
Big Beat, a boisterous hybrid of hip hop and house music, is currently the most popular dance sound in Britain. The genre's leading artist, Fatboy Slim just scored a UK number one single with "Praise You". And although Big Beat has yet to make its commercial breakthrough into the American pop charts, you can already hear the music in countless television commercials and on movie soundtracks ( Fatboy Slim's other big hit "The Rockafeller Skank" is featured in both She's All That and Office Space, while "Praise You" appears in the forthcoming Cruel Intentions). Big Beat works well in TV ads and Hollywood movies because it's good times music, peppy and upbeat. It's also catchy as hell, sampling hooks and riffs from early rap, disco, raunchy arena rock and Sixties frat-party sounds such as garage punk and surf.
Because of the genre's retro-nuevo aura, even Big Beat's fiercest supporters admit that it's not especially original, innovative or intelligent. Yet the music made by Lo-Fidelity Allstars--who emerged from the Big Beat scene and share the same UK label, Skint Records, with Fatboy Slim--exhibits all three of these attributes. The band's debut album How To Operate With A Blown Mind (Columbia) exudes a harrowed and haunted atmosphere strikingly at odds with big beat's cheery rumpus. Where a producer like Norman Cook of Fatboy Slim lifts samples from old school Eighties rap and disco for their tried-and-tested crowd-pleasing power, Lo-Fidelity Allstars's sonic plundering achieves a more poignant effect. The band's dense mish-mash of samples--which encompass Eartha Kitt, James Last, Rick James, Lalo Schifrin, and The Three Degrees, among many others--conjures a sense of contemporary pop consciousness as polluted by the past, infected by nostalgia for eras never directly experienced.
Lo-Fidelity Allstars call their style "punk paste," shorthand for a merger of rock attack with the cut-and-paste techniques of DJ-driven genres like hip hop and house. The word "paste" actually works even better as a tag for the way the band transcend mere eclecticism and blend its diverse sources into a lumpy but distinctive puree. Partly this stems from the fact that the Allstars are a proper band capable of performing live onstage, rather than a solitary DJ/producer making records at home using a computer. Lo-Fidelity Allstars also write songs with lyrics, rather than tracks peppered with sampled vocal hooks (as is the case with most big beat).
Vocalist Dave Randall-- who quit the band shortly before the delayed US release of the album--belongs to the English lineage of technically limited but charismatic "non-singers" that includes Public Image Ltd's John Lydon, The Fall's Mark E. Smith and Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays. Like Smith and Ryder, Randall sings in a baleful, bilious drawl and pens imagistic, cut-up lyrics. The album's title track, for instance, is a stream of semi-consciousness that vividly evokes drifting disorientated through the squalor and sensory overload of small hours London: "the air's alive with daggers and poisons... severe mental fog... the man's a monster in his own time... hydra-headed fear is all around here."
Often, it's hard to decipher what Randall's ranting about, because his voice is distorted through studio effects, making it sound like a megaphone, or stretching out the final syllable of a line into a distended smear. In fact, most of the instrumental sounds on the album--cantakerous basslines, bubbling clavinet synths, chickenscratch guitar riffs--are warped, contorted, and fuzzed-up. Lo-Fidelity Allstars's music flirts with chaos but never succumbs to it, echoing the old Public Enemy aesthetic ideal of hip hop as "organised noise". Indeed, The Allstars proclaim their affiliation to old school rap by using scratching, electro-style drum machine rhythms, and samples from Eric B & Rakim, Just Ice and Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force. Randall's sung-spoken delivery could be heard as a uniquely English form of rapping.
Ultimately, though, Lo-Fidelity Allstars are shaped more by British rave than American rap. Song titles like "Blisters On My Brain" and "How To Operate With A Blown Mind" suggest that Randall is drawing on inside knowledge when he documents the darkside of the dance-and-drug lifestyle. A glitterball surge of disco percussion and synths, "Blisters" sees him gibbering about "injecting a rush/sniffing lunar dust" and getting "scrambled" on the illegal stimulant Ecstasy. Long term, excessive hedonism can lead to paranoia and burn-out, a state of mindwrecked confusion and numb despondency gestured at in the album closer "Nightime", where the singer wonders "What's it all gonna mean/When audio psychosis spills from the speaker's cones/And you can hear the music tear/Tearing through your bones?". If you've spent the night partying like there's no tomorrow, what happens when tomorrow inevitably arrives? If you can't somehow integrate the blissed-out utopianism of the rave dancefloor into everyday life, you return to a reality that only feels even bleaker than before. Lo-Fidelity Allstars don't have any answers to these quandaries, with which many of their generation are now grappling. But the band's turbulent sound and dark vision indicate a path beyond the impasses that have stalled dance culture in its tracks these last few years.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The expanded/updated anniversary edition of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture is out now.
With six extra chapters and 40 thousand added words, the remixed Energy Flash--a.k.a. Generation Ecstasy--takes in developments in dance music in the decade since its original 1998 publication: the trance explosion, 2-step garage, filter house, the nu-Eighties electro sound, microhouse/minimal, grime, breakcore, dubstep, and more.
Further information here
With six extra chapters and 40 thousand added words, the remixed Energy Flash--a.k.a. Generation Ecstasy--takes in developments in dance music in the decade since its original 1998 publication: the trance explosion, 2-step garage, filter house, the nu-Eighties electro sound, microhouse/minimal, grime, breakcore, dubstep, and more.
Further information here
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