I can still recall the moment I realized the degree to which my brain had been rewired by advertising. I was speaking with a friend, and though I no longer recall the subject of our conversation, they began to say, “No little….” In a flash, a voice in my head exploded: “…cinnamon gum freshens breath longer than Big Red.” I didn’t just register the phrase; I heard it, experienced every peak and valley of the classic voiceover’s undulating cadence. It was like a psychic autocomplete function: 10 words that had blanketed the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood so fully that they were now imprinted into my subconscious and called up by the slightest trigger.
If they’re reading, the Avalanches may be nodding sagely. The Australian group (Robbie Chater, Tony Di Blasi, and Andy Szekeres) has spent its career tending to the earworms that burrow through our minds, growing verdant gardens out of musical compost. Now, on their fourth album, No Bad Memories, the Avalanches dig into the sounds of commerce: decades’ worth of jingles, audio logos, and advertising dialogue, all tossed into their trusty sampledelic heap along with the usual bucketloads of vintage soul and easy listening. Underscoring the mad-scientist determination of their quest, the whole thing plays out against a backdrop of whiz-bang din—much of it composed with the assistance of digital-noise virtuoso Ryoji Ikeda—sourced from whirring hard disks and other discarded electronic gizmos.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Fun comes naturally to the Avalanches, but, as all those rubbery boings and zaps and fizzing spouts of soda pop will attest, the group has never sounded quite this zany. The album opens with an extended succession of mechanical chugging, cartoonish plinks, and corporate audiomarks before launching into the Daphni-esque UK garage skip of “Together,” a rollicking collaboration with Nikki Nair, Jessy Lanza, and Prentiss; delirious bursts of Madison Avenue flotsam cushion nearly every song on the record. The sound effects and skits don’t merely act as separators; sometimes they infiltrate the songs themselves. When a jubilant whoa-oh-oh chorus builds to a climax in “Together,” right where you’d expect the drop, there’s a moment of silence punctuated by buzzing electronics and a voice that intones, “Toshiba”—a stone-faced punchline before the groove comes flooding back. Experienced on a heaving dancefloor, the name of the Japanese electronics giant might scan nonsensically, but in the context of the album, woven into the fabric of the song like this, it suggests that nothing, not even the most carefree romp, is immune to commercialism’s viral spread.
