The wait for the Avalanches’ second album was so long that it became an in-joke; a white whale for those who spent the turn of the millennium hunting through the mountain of samples from which they sculpted their debut, ‘Since I Left You’. It’s been almost 16 years, but ‘Wildflower’ is finally here and it demonstrates that they have lost none of their compositional guile, nor misplaced their appetite for flights of fancy.
This is a record to be marvelled at in terms of the technical details of its construction. It is another maze of old ideas made new and, to anyone on the outside looking in, difficult to get a handle on in terms of its actual mechanics. None of that really registers while you are exploring it, though. As its predecessor was, ‘Wildflower’ is a devilishly complicated piece of work that succeeds in pressing the buttons that great pop music always has: it alternately sweeps you away, makes you laugh or want to dance.
You might easily get lost among the specifications of a record like this one, but the Avalanches never settle for solely colouring between those lines. Songs here bleed into one another, burst into life from nothing and disappear on strange tangents, making this an experience rather than a demonstration of technical ability. Its movements are surprising and feel organic, which remains the ace up the band’s sleeve.
This time around, though, there are a few more helping hands involved. By bringing in collaborators to handle vocal duties on a number of songs, the Avalanches have pushed their roles as curators and orchestrators somewhere entirely different. It makes them even harder to pin down stylistically, while also demonstrating the sound nature of their decision-making process.
After Camp Lo chime in to get things moving on the effervescent Because I’m Me, Danny Brown jumps on Frankie Sinatra, a song so wild that its batshit video really only tells part of the story. His bug-eyed delivery takes its hip hop-through-the-looking-glass feel to a whole new level, his verses punching in and out of a sample from Wilmoth Houdini’s Bobby Sox Idol that’s twisted into a nightmarish take on calypso. “I’m so high, you’re so high. If I take another sip then I just might die,” Brown yelps.
Similarly, interjections from Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue, Royal Trux’s Jennifer Herrema and Warren Ellis hew closer to traditional ‘songs’ than the Avalanches have felt compelled to before, with the tracklist therefore sending us wandering across fresh ground regularly. Winding this new thread around a framework that delivers everything you’d want in the successor to ‘Since I Left You’ makes ‘Wildflower’ a treasure worth waiting for.
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