The Avalanches – No Bad Memories Review
The Avalanches sift through fragmented memories, advertising jingles and an unlikely cast of collaborators on a fourth album whose sunny exterior conceals a restless undercurrent.
Rather than No Bad Memories, The Avalanches’ fourth album could have been called No Bad Vibes. As that would seem to be a core tenet – along with a prodigious knack for sampling, and the ability to create irresistible ear worms – of any Avalanches project. They’re hardly the same group that seemingly came from nowhere, over a quarter-century ago, and gave the world an instant classic (and sample-clearer’s nightmare), Since I Left You.
That record was the perfect encapsulation of a feeling, a vibe: an endless summer evening where the sun never sets and you never lose that two-drink buzz. That feeling exists as a sepia-tinged polaroid picture with crinkled edges, where the faces are blurred but still visibly smiling. Or more clearly as a memory, an inviting reverie in which you could happily lose yourself for a few hours.
No Bad Memories takes on nostalgia, or memory anyway, but approaches it in a manner befitting our attention-depleted and information-overloaded times, where culture exists on a flat continuum with any style from any era being instantly accessible and infinitely remixable. Maybe that’s always been true for inveterate crate diggers like The Avalanches. But the whole notion of nostalgia feels different now, from how it did at the time of Since I Left You’s release, which followed a decade characterised by optimism in a tech-powered future, and before the clouds of 9/11 darkened the horizon. But No Bad Memories has dropped in a much darker age, when not a day goes by without another story portending humanity’s imminent demise, be it through war, climate collapse or becoming the victims of our own technology.
But as I said, good vibes are woven into The Avalanches’ DNA, so this darkness never breaks through on the record, instead it lives beneath the surface as suppressed tension. You can feel it in the jagged interludes between the longer cuts, sharp bursts of digital noise and fractured synthetic glitches. And in the way every track refuses to settle into a steady mood for more than a minute or two. Avalanches albums have always taken the form of meandering mixes, but the pace of change is intensified here, to the impatient rapidity of someone doom scrolling, endlessly pulling their thumb to see something new, rather than laying back and gently surfing the radio waves.
So along with good vibes, samples are of course a crucial component of No Bad Memories. But much like 2020’s We Will Always Love You, itself an embarrassment of riches packed so full guest performers they were almost competing to be heard at times, No Bad Memories features an impressive roster of collaborators, including names that feel bizarre when placed in the same context. Hayley Joel Osment and Mike Patton? And where else might experimental Japanese noise/visual artist, Ryoji Ikeda be found alongside Portraits of Tracy, fitting comfortably with Barry Can’t Swim?
This seemingly random approach to guest appearances - where every choice is possible - echoes the infinite carousel of social media. But it’s testament to The Avalanches’ craft that they can meld and mould such disparate influences and source material into something that, while fragmented and chaotic, feels like a coherent work, and is recognisable only as The Avalanches.
Another influence that looms large but whose name doesn’t appear with a “featuring” credit is Oneohtrix Point Never, an artist who mines the depths of nostalgia in pursuit of a fascination with near history and obsolete technology. As he did on last year’s Tranquilizer, deploying a sample pack dating to the turn of the millennium to create dreamy vignettes of familiar, almost banal sounds but jarringly untethered from their original context. There’s a deep kinship between that record and the interludes that sit as the base layer of sonic wallpaper on No Bad Memories, appearing in the gaps between longer cuts, as snatches of bygone corporate jingles splutter and dissolve into digital ephemera.
Indeed, a personified floppy disk and ipod stride merrily forward hand in hand in the video for Together. And the achingly bittersweet lyrics that close out the track “Staring at a picture on my phone, staring at a memory that's gone” are a reminder that such devices serve as memory storage, and how long we’ve been outsourcing this most fundamental aspect of our humanity to fragile technologies that warp the contents, fragment and decay.
But it’s hard to get deep for too long, because within moments the record’s flipped, to the sunny Motown supplied by Loaded Honey on I Give Everything I Have 2 U, which is then quickly sent skywards on a bumping house beat. Before you can settle into the groove, Every Single Weekend (feat Jamie XX) takes over, with another deliciously bouncy beat and a chorus of kids’ voices, that seems to make an appearance on every Avalanches record.
Which brings us to that third strand of Avalanches DNA – their knack for irresistible ear worms that burrow deep into your brain. No Bad Memories is full of them, presented in a constantly shifting array, with the distinction of what constitutes original contribution and what’s sampled, dissolving. As a listening experience, it reminds me of flipping between TV stations as a kid and catching fragments of advertising jingles, which have a tendency of being the thing your memory decides to preserve in perfect form for decades, at the expense of actual life events.
Like the El Dorado soft drink, consumed by sun-bronzed youths in the TV commercial satirised in the video for Every Single Weekend, the whole record fizzes with the over-saturated aesthetic and exaggerated emotion of advertising. But the fleeting nature of the songs only makes them more bittersweet. As Rivers Cuomo sings, “We have all the time in the world, No worries no” on All The Time in The World you really feel you can believe it, if only for a moment.