We Will Always Love You is the third album from The Avalanches, a group known for their work in the genre of sample-based music which they arguably carried to its full potential with Since I Left You, their 2000 debut album which currently stands as their most celebrated achievement. What made The Avalanches’ approach to sample-based music so groundbreaking in Since I Left You was sonic density: every track in the album layers sample on top of sample, and the resulting tapestry is beautiful for the diversity and obscurity of the individual threads. After a staggering 16-year hiatus, they surprised fans with Wildflower, and now the release of We Will Always Love You seems to indicate they’re here to stay. As much as their followers would like to celebrate this fact, we must confront the truth that they are not the same group who released Since I Left You nor are they even the same group who released Wildflower.
Halfway through the creation of Wildflower, co-founder Darren Seltmann left, leaving behind the group’s two current members, Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi, and it’s tempting to attribute the shift in style to Seltmann’s diminishing influence. While Since I Left You presented itself as fastidiously devoted to being exclusively sample-based, this standard was relaxed in Wildflower’s willingness to incorporate newly recorded rap and vocals over the sample-based instrumentals. We Will Always Love You is undoubtedly a further step in this direction, but as fans have been divided over whether this is a good direction, the reception to this album is bound to be no less divided.
To produce something like Since I Left You or even something like Wildflower is such a painstaking process that the 16-year hiatus and Seltmann’s departure are entirely understandable; the band’s troubled history should be a testament to the broken nature of the copyright system and how stifling it can be for the creation of new art. If the overwhelming beauty of their prior work seems less present in their latest release, it is because The Avalanches can either create timeless and transcendent masterpieces of densely interwoven sonic textures, or they can create music which comes close but must necessarily cut some corners in order to be released within a reasonable timeframe. In the past, there seemed to be a greater dedication to obscurity in the samples used; here, on the other hand, they’re drawing from more recognizable sources (“Eye in the Sky” by The Alan Parsons Project, “Electric Counterpoint” by Steve Reich, “Glow Worms” by Vashti Bunyan and “Hammond Song” by The Roches). Most importantly, We Will Always Love You seems more stripped down, less layered than The Avalanches’ prior output, but then again, my experiences with the band have taught me that there’s often more layers than one may imagine from a first glance.
My first listening experience with We Will Always Love You reminds me of the joy and sadness I felt on my first listen-through of Wildflower: saddened that I wasn’t as blown away as I expected to be, yet nonetheless overjoyed at the album’s existence. At the time, I would never imagine that four years later I would consider Wildflower as superior to Since I Left You. The genre-bending incorporation of hip-hop into the psychedelic sample-tapestry doesn’t make Wildflower less ambitious than its predecessor, but rather makes it more ambitious and also more accessible. While I sympathize with the fans who want more music like Since I Left You, I also realize I can’t call myself a true fan if I’m constantly second-guessing the musicians’ creative choices instead of giving myself time to properly connect with the music. In time, I could easily see We Will Always Love You ascend to the position of my favorite Avalanches record (like Wildflower did); whether other listeners will be able to develop this same connection depends on how well they can connect with the themes the album aesthetically centers itself around.
While the samples in Since I Left You span decades, the overall aesthetic — its art featuring a nautical painting and its lyrics referencing flights and cruises — intentionally calls to mind a vintage world from some golden age Hollywood romance film (think Roman Holiday or Charade). Wildflower, by contrast, puts dreamy Beatles-era textures front and center to create a psychedelic odyssey through a countercultural flower-child utopia of endless summer (and goes a step further by resuscitating this utopian dream from the past through using the hip-hop elements to make it feel fresh and current). We Will Always Love You journeys further into the future and seems to function as the night to Wildflower’s day by means of its preoccupation with outer space and the electronica-centric palette which accompanies this chosen subject.
In their promotion of the album, The Avalanches have made themselves very clear concerning the concepts they had in mind while assembling it, and chief among their thoughts was the Voyager Golden Record (which, of course, they sample on this album). The same optimistic sentiment which predominated the hippie suburban dreamscape of Wildflower is here turned heavenward, towards ideas of mortality and the afterlife, particularly the idea of music being not just the echo of a musician’s voice as their personal afterlife, but also (in the form of the Golden Record) an echo of our species’ existence after mortality arrives in a more collective sense. In the song “Interstellar Love,” Leon Bridges sings the line “God created space and time with no end / If he did it once, he can do it again.” Surrounding each life (the life of an individual, a species, a universe) is a dark void, and the only thing powerful enough to traverse this void (between lives, between planets, between universes) is love. In this album, The Avalanches ask us to embrace this idea and to then envision that love as taking the form of music. After all, on that Golden Record is a recording of Ann Druyan’s heartbeat the day after Carl Sagan proposed to her; in this record of our species is love in sonic form, and The Avalanches have made a spectrograph of Ann Druyan the album artwork to show how central this idea is to this music.
Despite confronting our planet’s mortality, We Will Always Love You is far from an expression of mourning. Rather, it’s a celebration of the cosmic afterlife afforded to us by music. Imagine if — on the surface of this Golden Record, drifting off into infinite night — there was a dance party. This is the mental space the album inhabits. There’s an optimism here that will come off as innocent and charming to some and naive and simplistic to others. Whether or not you can groove to the interstellar dance party they’ve created here will likely depend on whether or not you can play along with this particular wavelength of sentimentality. When all is said and done, though, this record is, frankly, a bop. The title track, in my opinion the strongest of the singles released in anticipation of the album, is still perhaps the album’s strongest track; the use of the high-pitched background chorus to generate a sense of the ethereal is as recurring a musical motif here as it was in Wildflower, though here its meaning (and by extension, its impact) is entirely different. Meanwhile, “Reflecting Light,” which originally struck me as one of the weaker singles, is now quite evidently one of the album’s hardest hitters; Sananda Maitreya’s soulful vocals convey all of the sincerity the content demands.
When artists as open to experimentation as The Avalanches release new material, it’s often difficult to process, but it’s just as often rewarding. My present thoughts on We Will Always Love You are hopeful. Yes, there is a feeling here that some old magic has been compromised to bring us this new music, but I encourage those confronting that feeling to accept it, because the results of that compromise still manage to satisfy. This isn’t the same Avalanches that made Since I Left You, but it is still The Avalanches and we’re so lucky to have them back. My hope is twofold: first, I have hope that their increase in recent activity will put them more on the map and introduce more listeners to their amazing material, and second, I hope that We Will Always Love You will continue to grow on me with each listen, though it’s not hard to imagine both of these things coming to pass.
Julia Rhodes (@headphones_cat) is a video essayist and fledgling writer from Long Island, New York who operates the Essential Films YouTube channel. She currently spends her free time writing screenplays and watching the same 10 movies over and over again. Julia has seen her favorite film, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, 16 times.
Categories: 2020 Music Reviews, Featured, Music Reviews
1 reply »