The Avalanches – ‘No Bad Memories’ review: excessive and overstimulating by design
The Avalanches have always been eclectic, but even by their own standards ‘No Bad Memories’ is a manic listen. With 31 tracks crammed into 52 minutes, their fourth LP is full to bursting. There are more than 20 guests drawn from a preposterously broad spectrum, from experimental colossi like Suzanne Ciani, indie heroes like Karen O and Panda Bear, safe-hands producers Jamie xx and Barry Can’t Swim, voiceovers from Mike Patton of Faith No More, and a rare appearance from Carly Simon. It even comes accompanied with a surrealist multi-format sci-fi film starring Haley Joel Osment. And that’s to say nothing of dozens more voices that appear as samples.
Where the entirety of predecessor ‘We Will Always Love You’ was anchored by consistent melancholy, here the guiding theme is advertising, branding and nostalgia. The album is constantly interrupted by snippets of commercials and sonic artefacts from the dawn of the digital era like the whir of a hard drive or the click of a mouse, such as on ‘Together’, where the instantly recognisable Nokia ringtone is flipped into a half-garage, half-hyperpop heater.
For The Avalanches, advertising is morally ambiguous, a place of both rampant capitalism and undeniable creativity, much like how ‘No Bad Memories’ is constantly shifting in tone. It’s joyous in places, like a smooth neo-soul collaboration with Jungle side-project Loaded Honey that appears early on and is reprised as the penultimate track, while elsewhere that despondency that defined their last record returns in force. But the more upbeat cuts don’t feel like they’re probing the idea of adverts so much as pandering toward bare-faced commerciality with their lack of edge.
They also move between these extremes chaotically. When it begins flowing in one direction, the album will suddenly spin to careen down another. Sometimes this can be aggravating; just as the big wash of synths on latter-stage track ‘Total Recall’ starts to build into something properly magical, the rug is swept from beneath it by yet another advert, a trick that soon wears thin. Conversely, the album’s best songs are those that get the chance to stretch out a little: the shimmering melancholy of the Karen O-led ‘Blue Shadows’, Portraits Of Tracy’s heart-on-sleeve vocal on sad-pop banger ‘Can’t Get Over Losing You’, or John Glacier’s razor-sharp flow over the rushing beats of ‘Far Away’.
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There is a lot thrown at the wall on ‘No Bad Memories’ and not all of it sticks. Like the adverts that inspired it, the album is excessive and overstimulating by design, sometimes to its detriment. And yet, the songs that are strong enough to poke through this overload of ideas are as good as pop music gets, gems as precious as anything they’ve ever produced.
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