The Avalanches, and why they matter.

The Avalanches, for the sake of a formal definition, were a six piece electronic group who specialized in the under-appreciated genre of plunderphonics. Plunderphonics is an extremely niche sub-genre of electronic music whose entire sound revolves around the manipulation of sampled works to create a wholly original track. The reason plunderphonics as a genre has sort of died over these past couple of years relates solely to the way sample clearing has changed. It used to be much simpler back in the late Nineties and early 2000s, with the smaller-scale music publishers in the industry being more easy to negotiate with when it came to contracts determining how much to compensate the publisher for allowing use of the sample. Nowadays, those smaller scale publishers are borderline non-existent and the powerhouses of the music industry e.g. Universal Music Group, Epic Records. Sub-Pop, etc. find themselves less inclined to clear samples unless rather hefty percentages are given to them for their generosity. But, that’s a digression for another day. What I’d like to write about today concerns the group I defined above and their masterpiece to this day, “Since I Left You.”

In an era where the most popular strain of electronic music belongs to the loud, noisy, almost obnoxious styling of EDM, “Since I Left You” acts as a testament of sorts that the larger genre of electronic music can still maintain artistic merit while appealing to a mass of people. Case in point: “Electricity” and “Frontier Psychiatrist”, the lead singles for the record. The two are almost complete opposites when it comes to musical stylings: “Electricity” being a disco-funk throwback and “Frontier Psychiatrist” being a kooky trip through various samples ranging from John Waters films to brass sections to a parrot squawking. “Frontier Psychiatrist” was the world’s first real brush with the group and its commercial success means the song is the sole hit single of the group. Both of them, despite their differences, appeal to pop sensibilities, “Electricity” with its slick dance-y sound and “Frontier Psychiatrist” with its off-kilter flair. Both have core melodies that remain easily accessible to the average listener, and (more importantly) both have sounds distancing them from the pop sounds of the era. For a more modern example, look at OMI’s “Cheerleader”: it was the first mainstream hit of the burgeoning tropical house sound and effectively garnered a lot of attention for being a different sound in the era of loud EDM. Similarly, back in 2000, pop would have skewed more towards R&B as well as more adult variants of it, along with the beginnings of the Max Martin’s reign in pop. Even in electronic music, the Avalanches’ work stood out as, at the time, the genre itself was split leaning to opposite extremes, one heading to a more slow and relaxed style, the other going all in on the higher tempo frenetic songs of breakbeat and jungle. In comparison, both of the singles reflect the unique and distinctive sound the Avalanches created with the record.

“Since I Left You” is a very special album, not just personally but also for the electronic music genre as a whole. The album, along with the work of instrumental hip-hop legend DJ Shadow, helped legitimize sampling, in a sense. To a lot of older people enamored with music, sampling can be seen as a bit of a musical cop-out. One doesn’t really need “talent” to make a decent song with sampling, just sample a bit of a popular song, loop it, add a bass line, drum kicks, etc. and voila, you have yourself a legally separate and musically decent song on your hands. (See: “Ice Ice Baby” and “Under Pressure”) Instead, “Since I Left You” goes for a more difficult and unique sounding approach to sampling, instead treating each song like a veritable collage of musical genres, each bit contrasting, enhancing, or distorting the other samples in unique ways. With over 3,500 samples in the entirety of this 18 song album, the math works out to show the average song here contains nearly 200 samples. And what’s more impressive is the variety from which the samples originate, everything from obscure French pop to film dialogue to classical music. It’s an incredibly dense work to break down but also happens to be one of the most easy-to-listen and rhythmic works I’ve ever heard.

“Since I Left You” starts off with…”Since I Left You”, an intro track that sets the listener up for what exactly they are in for. The song starts off slow enough with some strings being plucked amidst party chatter, some woodwinds enter the picture, and then the core vocal melody kicks in. And from there, the listener is whisked to a party somewhere tropical, where colorful lights adorn the area. A second vocal sample enters, reciting “Since I met you / I found the world so blue” and having it distorted by the group. And here’s where the layering of the samples really shines. In one ten to fifteen second bit of song, samples play of what must be a triangle being hit, vocal snippets from a film, a synth line, drums, a set of twinkling synths, and likely more. The sheer disparity in sample type astounds and when they come together something just clicks. It is moments like these that explain what has made the group so beloved, beloved enough for people to wait 16 years for a new record. These moments happen to occur throughout the record, and there is something wonderful in seeing a record that manages to stay as consistently great as this one does.  That alone would be enough of an accomplishment, but the Avalanches took it one step further and made the album feel beautifully cohesive. Much like the waves depicted on the front of the cover, the album flows, with each song leading in to one another. And even with that, the Avalanches made each song sound distinct. Take “Stay Another Season”. If “Since I Left You” is the sound of a party in full swing, “Stay Another Season” is the soundtrack to the party’s end, the point where you and your pals are walking back home, drunkenly messing around and enjoying the wee hours of the night. Its purpose in the track listing is to act as a transition, but the way it does so is unique: it plays off the outro of “Since I Left You”, keeping the vocal refrain present throughout with varying degrees of prominence. With that as the backbone, the song uses a whirlwind of samples, from a loop of guitar chords to what sounds like European pop to even a somber snippet of a string section, to keep the song feeling interesting before introducing the lead-in to “Radio”, the sound of a police siren.  Normally, in any other work, these transitional interludes are usually palate cleansers, ways for the audience to stop focusing on one song and set for the next big one, and are almost always forgettable and excisable: rap albums had awful skits (Dr. Dre’s 2001) or just instrumentals like “Madvillainy” (an album whose instrumental bits alone are 10/10). In this case, the Avalanches crafted interludes that feel every bit as essential to the fiber of the record as the big moments. “Avalanche Rock” feels just as essential as “Radio”, “Two Hearts in ¾ Time” is as important as “Frontier Psychiatrist”, and so on. In terms of an analogy, “Since I Left You” is a grand tapestry with no thread able to be pulled out without compromising the tapestry as a whole. 

And while I could say a lot of modern records do feel like they lack the stuff that makes “Since I Left You” so special, it would feel unwarranted because a great album doesn’t need to have the traits that make the record so special. A lot of my favorite records don’t have that direct flowing nature that the Avalanches have and focus their cohesiveness in theme rather than song structure. The reason I titled this the way I did is because what the Avalanches did with their work was give it a palpable sense of fun, of whimsy, of “we’re just creating music we like and we don’t give a fuck.” That’s why they matter. I could dissect the Avalanches work for quite a while, but all the analysis in the world couldn’t capture the feeling when you hear the synth line on “Radio” for the first time, or when you hear the horns on “Frontier Psychiatrist”, or when you hear the vocoder on “Live at Dominoes.” These are just moments when you can feel the groove, the energy, the whimsy, the pure enjoyment of the record, and just relish in it. A lot of modern records lack that, and take themselves a bit too seriously in either their intents to be smash hits, or powerfully sad works, or even in being joyful that they forget the way passion bleeds through the work. When Darren Seltman and Robbie Chater were creating this along with Dexter Fabey, Tony Di Blasi, Gordon McQuilten, and James De La Cruz, there was no intent to sell this record internationally let alone make a work intended to stand the test of mine. There were just two guys fucking around with bargain bin samples and creating something out of the love of music. “Since I Left You” is more than just a masterpiece in electronic music, and it’s more than a legitimizer of sampling. “Since I Left You” is a testament to what passion can bring out of music. The best music, personally, always comes out of moments of extreme emotion: “Kid A” was sadness, “Yeezus” was anger”, and “Since I Left You” was pure unadulterated joy.

You can stream "Since I Left You" on Spotify, Apple Music, and your streaming service of choice. If you enjoy it, I'd recommend listening to their "El Producto" EP or waiting for their new LP "Wildflower." In the meantime, check out their phenomenal DJ sets, cataloged in full at r/theavalanches. Thanks for reading.