Album of the week: Wildflower by The Avalanches

ELECTRONIC

Wildflower

The Avalanches

(Modular/Universal)

Until last week, The Avalanches’ Since I Left You stood as one of the great one-offs in music history, a turn-of-the-Millennium debut that defied conventions and has stood as one of the most adventurous albums released since the clock failed to go into doomsday mode on Y2K.

The Australian electronic outfit’s long-awaited sophomore album had great shoes to fill. Thankfully, Wildflower is the breath of fresh air we needed in what has been a bummer of a musical year (not in quality, mind you, but in tone — it’s been a bleak one).

Through 21 tracks, The Avalanches sample and mash-up old classics ranging from The Beatles and The Five Stairsteps to spoken word bits by Jean-Michel Basquiat, bits of film soundtracks (The Sound of Music’s My Favorite Things) and sound effects of cars, sirens, and people eating (the latter on the very Brian Wilson/Smile-esque Noisy Eater). 

Like its predecessor, Wildflower revels in being an electronic album without a true single, save for the colourful Frankie Sinatra, which features MF Doom and Danny Brown reappears at the end of the album in an extended remix. (It’s still a world away from the madness of Frontier Psychiatrist, their debut’s highlight.)

With other guest appearances including Biz Markie, Father John Misty and Warren Ellis (of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds), Wildflower ranges in styles from disco to flower-power pop to straight up rap, and it never fails to amaze in its unpredictable starts and stops and twists and turns. If 2016 needed a little sunshine on an album tailor-made for road trips, this is it.

fmarchand@postmedia.com

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