We live in the post-anticipation age, one where if gratification isn’t instant, it’s a hundred years too late.
The Avalanches, by contrast, have been sending us postcards from their vacation for almost two decades. Ignoring our urges, refusing to crumble to our demands for more, the original bunch of devotees to their long ordained début ‘Since I Left You‘ having long shuffled off into playlist and Spotify cultural euthanasia.
And now they’re back. Well, at least some of the Australian collective are back; Tony De Blasi and Robbie Chater fractions of a whole which always seemed unlikely to make it into its teenage years. (Other ‘Lanche Darren Seltmann was, it’s claimed, “present during production, but left during it”.) A great deal has changed since Bill Clinton was president and a pint of milk cost 34p, but part of ‘Since I Left You’s never-ending chemistry has been that attempts to imitate its gnostic formula of mixology and deft curation have been few, it being a case more of the playground changing than the game itself.
Chater has recently explained that much of the delay was due to personal reasons rather than indolence. Now that it’s here though, ‘Wildflower‘s tortuous growing pains are thankfully reconciled to being just those. It’s also reassuringly very much a 21st century production, boasting a raft of guest contributions from chums as diverse as Biz Markie to Ariel Pink, and clocking in at over an hour digitally.
Not that their innate sense of mischief and audio philately has deserted the Melbourners: first single ‘Frank Sinatra‘ is here in all its gloriously leftfield, eye poking curmudgeon, the bastard offspring of Cypress Hill soundtracking Looney Tunes, a signature release for an era that no longer recognises them.
Nothing else here is them quite as inspired or cocksure, but given that this is still technically their awkward second album, the abstract burps of creativity are more than proof of life enough. The obvious difference between then and now is in synthesis; whereas before samples were like strands of DNA coalesced into a whole, here they’re just samples – part of the rounding process, not the sum itself.
Above all, ‘Wildflower’ is fun; ‘The Noisy Eater‘ (with Markie again) beats infectiously, never knowingly oversold, whilst ‘The Wozard Of Iz‘ and its go anywhere Swami chintz sound like the Bee Gees scratching their way recklessly through a collection of Oxfam vinyl.
Hand on heart, it’s hard to know whether we wanted ‘Wildflower’ to be 2016’s most glorified mess or the ultimate crate digger’s mix tape, but luckily it comes as neither. Moreover, the grooves haven’t been lost where beats are let in, the inverted disco of ‘Subways‘ and its cross-faded partner ‘Going Home‘ putting a twilight rub on a record which positively revels in its duality.
One of the most interesting of these contrasts though is an unintended one, the notion Chater put forward that the oscillating styles are the equivalent of tuning into music on a road trip, like a radio coming in and out of focus from static. If this were the case, the listener would ask themselves if the looped chintz of ‘Sunshine‘ would shimmer, or whether the Carpenters-lite of ‘Kaleidoscopic Lovers‘ would last for very long before the skip button was pushed.
This impatience may be all their fault; in a way ‘Since I Left You’, with its nano-niche exploration, was the dawn of a cultural epoch without us even realising it, one where now we think of nothing but lining up behind art and media from the past we’ve previously ignored until it suited our state of mind. Embracing a record made up of a gazillion samples tacitly allowed us to endorse every one of them, cool hunting by fragging popular music from two feet away.
‘Wildflower’ is, you sense, a good record. Instinct comes into play in that assessment mainly because its centre is so intangible, and judging it against many other releases in its slipstream will be almost impossible. It’s one that’s also going to need distance, time for its audience to get their heads around it and it them.
A mass of contradictions, whether it was worth the wait – or if anything is worth waiting for – is probably going to take another sixteen years to work out.
