Search - Avalanches :: Since I Left You

Little-known, underrated...did I mention FABULOUS?

Brooke Pennington | Pocatello, ID USA | 06/25/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This intriguing electronic album from the Avalanches remains one of my all-time favorites more than two years after I purchased it. When I first listened to it, I didn't realize exactly how much of their music was made up of samples. I'm not overly musical myself and was even more impressed with the album when I found out that the songs are 100% sampled; no one in the band plays any instruments in the traditional sense.Now, on to what you're really wondering about: the content of the songs. The musical style is a little hard to pin down, but it is obviously influenced by the sample-heavy methods of most urban music styles. But this is definitely not a hip-hop record, or even one with a hip-hop influence. Instead the Avalanches have mixed a cut-and-paste aesthetic with a carefree, fun-loving attitude expressed by bands like Lemon Jelly. The result is music that is consistently fun and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny (such as many moments in "Frontier Psychiatrist"). The album opens with "Since I Left You", which samples what seems to be a pop singer from the forties or fifties. That introductory track is a bit misleading, as the rest of the album is much more frenzied and upbeat rather than sounding like a remix you might find on a "Verve Remixed" compilation. That's not a bad thing, though; after repeated listenings I usually find myself skipping the first track to get to the sunnier, more unpredictable rest of the album. The songs swoop and skip, with samples from the second track turning up again in the last few songs of the album. The sound quality of some of the samples is less than perfect, so the album is overlaid with a vintage-sounding record crackle in the bacground most of the time. It's terrific driving music and also makes a nice accompaniment to anything you're doing on a sunny day. One warning: I have found that the album works best as a whole, since the tracks bleed into one another and, with a couple of exceptions, seem to have been separated for the CD along completely arbitrary lines."