Album Review: Wildflower by The Avalanches

Musical dumpster-divers The Avalanches return after a 16-year hiatus (and a significant band reconfiguration) with Wildflower, which once again spins forgotten records into pop gold.

It took Guns N' Roses 5,479 days to release Chinese Democracy. Dr. Dre spent 5,744 days sweating over a follow-up to 2001. The definitive version of Smile cost Brian Wilson 38 years (and perhaps his sanity).

Australian producers The Avalanches are no slouches when it comes to the waiting game. For them, it’s been 5,702 days between drinks.

But on July 8, their second album in sixteen years, Wildflower, will be a thing; a physical item to be hugged and held, or, given the new landscape into which it emerges, a bundle of data to be streamed at will. Not quite as romantic a notion, is it?

Wildflower follows 2000’s iconic Since I Left You, which melted the Australian music scene with its “plunderphonic” sound. (It boasts 3,500 esoteric samples, rescued from John Waters movies, obscure comedy duos and, you know, actual music.)

Once Wildflower’s existence was officially confirmed earlier this year, the immense hype begat even wilder speculation. What kind of sonic sorcery requires 16 years of simmering? How would our puny brains be able to absorb Wildflower’s wizardry? And once our mind’s doors of perception were blown wide open, would we ever be able to close them again? Would we want to?

Obviously, this is too much pressure for any one project to bear. Even Smile, on first spin, left listeners thinking, “Oh, this sounds like a Brian Wilson record,” rather than inspiring a total paradigm shift.

And the same goes for Wildflower, which sounds like an Avalanches record (and now, with two under their belt, we are closer to pin-pointing what that exactly means). Beguiling from start to finish, with sporadic moments of genre-busting genius, Wildflower lives up to the outfit's lingering legacy of being ideal party wallpaper; something to leave on loop in the background, to the complaint of no one.

(Audiophiles, fear not: Wildflower is also an ideal headphones album, for those wanting to isolate its innumerable musical fragments privately, rather than let it alter the atmosphere of your next shindig.)

Remaining members Robbie Chater, Tony Di Blasi and James De La Cruz - down from the seven-man team that created Since I Left You - return us to familiar pastures on Wildflower, despite guests like Danny Brown, Father John Misty and Ariel Pink providing original vocals.

Early highlight “Because I’m Me” turns a housing project dirge into a horn-heavy and infectious Jackson 5-esque anthem, boosted by hip-hop duo Camp Lo’s giddy, nostalgic interstitials; its refrain is as joyous as Since I Left You’s perfect title track, from all those years ago.

The menacing, pinball parlour grind of “Frankie Sinatra” (with its early-2000 time-stamp courtesy of MF Doom) is this record’s “Frontier Psychiatrist”, and the hypnotic one-two butterfly kiss of “Subways” and “Colours” is its “Electricity”.

This means, like its predecessor, the remainder of Wildflower is mostly made up of entrancing segues from those standalone tracks. Though, mention must be made of Biz Markie’s singular “The Noisy Eater”, an ode to cereal punctuated by an unsettling interpolation from The Beatles’ “Come Together” and Markie’s own chewing noises. Plus, it’s worth mentioning that closers “Kaleidoscopic Lovers” and “Stepkids” happily recall another Aussie band from the early ‘oughts: The Sleepy Jackson.

Wildflower is a lovely listening experience, probably better suited to the summer – with its persistent sun-peeking-over-the-horizon imagery - than winter.

However, what can’t be denied is that it kills The Avalanches’ mystery, which always made Since I Left You better in retrospect.

If the band never returned, they’d have been remembered as one of music history’s most enigmatic curios. Now, having released a traditional album in 2016 like some sort of non-Kanye, they’ve opened themselves up to pigeon-holing.

The doors of perception have not been blown open by The Avalanches 2.0. They simply remain ajar; about where they were left when Since I Left You dropped in 2000.

4/5

Wildflower is now streaming on Apple Music. It will be available to buy on July 8.