For All Of Y’all Who Didn’t Fail At School

The Avalanches “Harmony”

The Avalanches’ new record is a pretty joyful thing, but it bums me out in that it’s a reminder of how rare and precious thing dense, complex sample-based music has become in this era. You still get some here and there, mainly on records by big money artists like Kanye West and Beyoncé who can afford clearances without any problem. But money and legal issues have made this craft incredibly impractical and ridiculously time consuming, and fashion moved away from the aesthetics of your Prince Pauls, DJ Shadows, Automators, and Avalanches. A lot of Wildflower sounds like it’s been sitting on a shelf for over a decade, but more like a bottle of wine in a cellar than something that wasn’t worth releasing back in the day. “Harmony” weaves together scraps of sunshine pop into something that’s even sunnier than the source material. There’s a lovely weightlessness to the sound of it, as though you’re just strolling around town hearing the bits from the song pass by on the breeze and it’s somehow accidentally gelling into a composition. It’d sound magical in any case, but this sort of music being fairly rare these days only makes it seem more so.

Buy it from Amazon.