Cosmic connections
Third album by the Australian sample-lovers, properly reaching for the stars. By Jude Rogers. The Avalanches ★★★★
We Will Always Love You EMI. CD/DL/LP
ANY 25-TRACK “exploration of the vibrational relationship between light, sound and spirit” should be approached with breath held. After all, mind-melting new age concept album blow-outs are hard to get right, even if you’re a band as dexterous and ambitious at weaving samples into radio-friendly songs as Australian duo, The Avalanches.
Their third album in 20 years has a deeper story behind it, however, and one that straddles the universe, no less. This is the romance between late American cosmologist Carl Sagan and science documentary director Ann Druyan (that’s her face on the cover art, in eerie, stretched-out neon blue). Both science communicators, the couple shared a longing to bring the ever-deepening mysteries of the universe to mass audiences through books and TV. They also put together the
Golden Record, an album of music, sounds and
speech from Earth, which was sent into space on Voyager 1 in 1977. Touchingly, it included Druyan talking about what it was like for humans to fall in love.
We Will Always Love You takes the wonder of that moment and skyrockets it through multiple, intriguing moments. Many are shivery and eerie, like the opening track, Ghost Story, featuring Superorganism vocalist Orono Noguchi. She speaks directly to someone she’ll always love, apologising for leaving so suddenly and being so far away. Spectres of distance and death hover around her words; it’s hard not to feel them deeply in our pandemic-pummelled world.
Then the songs come, lifted by joyful, celestial textures and samples. When The Roches’ Hammond Song pops up in the title track (the album’s title comes from one of its lyrics), it’s an exquisite moment, the women’s voices offering glistening hope after Blood Orange ruminates on fear. Odd bedfellows Sergio Mendes and Jimmy Osmond become magical spectres behind Neneh Cherry and Jamie xx on Wherever You Go, a track that also includes excerpts from the Golden Record.
As UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and then-US President Jimmy Carter send compassionate messages to other civilisations, you cling to them in these troubling times.
There are many other fascinating, unusual collaborations. Sananda Maitreya and Vashti Bunyan provide delicate, soulful yin and yang on Reflecting Light. MGMT and Johnny Marr turn The Divine Chord into bouncing, otherworldly bubblegum (imagine a well-crafted Flaming Lips curio). Tricky, Mick Jones, Karen O, Kurt Vile, Leon Bridges and Rivers Cuomo are also in the cast, but this never feels thrown-together, which is some achievement. Instead, the album feels like one to spend ample amounts of time with as you travel into its far-flung corners as it reaches for the stars.