So out of sheer boredom I was browsing through the
NME Top 100 Greatest Albums of the Decade, which is largely disagreeable bollocks (I don't know what I was expecting to be honest*) but in at number 45 is the Avalanches' debut Since I Left You.
I used to love this CD back in the day, but I've not listened to it for years, and seeing it halfway down the list got me keen for a reload. Having finally managed to dig the album out of a shoebox of long-unplayed CDs, fucking hell does it still sound fresh. The production on this thing is just top notch. Wikipedia would have you believe that there are over 3500 individual vinyl samples on the ingredients list, and it's just great fun. Even the boring bits are cool!
Frontier Psychiatrist is probably the stand out track on the album, being one of those tracks that almost everyone appears to have heard, without knowing who produced it or where it came from. It seems that even these days when you're picking your way through someone's iTunes library at a party it'll be on there, and everyone loves it. My favourite track has still gotta be Electricity, but the breaks under Flight Tonight are also bloody lovely. Makes you appreciate French hip hop too, even though listening to it makes you look like a bit of a bellend.
The Avalanches are one of those bands that I check in on every few years when something reminds me they exist just to see if they're still working. Been waiting for a follow up to Since I Left You for almost eight years now. Apparently it's been in production for a while, but the band are struggling to clear all the samples and whatnot. Word on the streets is that it's coming out 2009, but with less than a month til 2010, this is looking unlikely.
Yet another reason to be pissed off with copyright laws really. Obviously, people producing the original samples have gotta get paid, but they're hardly being ripped off here. The Avalanches are simply taking what they did, combining it with a load of other people's work and producing something greater than the sum of its parts. If the people who dreamt up the original copyright laws back during the time of the Sumerians had imagined the existence of sampling, perhaps we'd be better off? Surely there must be a happy medium whereby producers can produce and artists can make cash money?
Ah well, give Since I Left You a spin and then check out The Go! Team for more crazy sample insanity.
*I know that picking on the NME is an easy target, but seriously, who is it being marketed to these days? When I was a kid it seemed to be aimed at middle-aged people who still listen to Radio 1 and nowadays its demographic has shifted to the same sort of age group as Newsround. Scroobius Pip had it right.
