Music Review: No Bad Memories by The Avalanches

Written by Thomas Mason

The Avalanches have always been a band that is relentlessly happy. For over 25 years now they’ve been known as the group making fun music that you can't help but groove to patched together with samples from roughly the 60s ever since 2000 with the genre-establishing Since I Left You. For their newest project, No Bad Memories, the optimism of 80s nostalgia is in full swing, as the seeds of the modern internet are being planted and people are thinking much more about how exciting the new tech is than the horrors it could eventually unleash. This is their most internet-heavy album yet, and I would describe this as the Avalanches fully entering the digital age. They haven't let go of the classic styles of sampling they employ, but the music here is far and away the most "modern" of their releases, and the tracks are shorter and choppier than ever (perhaps to account for the kids these days having worse attention spans.) You can owe this new sound at least partially to Andrew Szekeres joining the Avalanches. He hails from the Midnight Juggernauts, an Australian band that rode the same wave as groups like Justice and Crystal Castles while similarly leaning electronic.

Sadly, the Avalanches failed to really capitalize on that theming and churned out a slightly modernized We Will Always Love You, the first album Szekeres worked on and the album I consider easily the worst in their discography. No Bad Memories similarly holds a bloated list of features, far too many interludes, and some of the most beautiful and captivating pieces of music I've ever heard. It's funny how that works, but it's not surprising because this album throws 31 songs at you and at least one of them should stick at that point. Of course, some of these songs are interludes, and while I don't mind an interlude here or there, the tracklist is generously 33% interludes and ungenerously 50% interludes. They hurt the flow of the album heavily, especially in the first third as the Avalanches try to find their footing. The songs near the start of the album are great but they can't develop into anything because of the constant interludes. I don't particularly get this decision, since they don't clearly express a story or even an idea and most of them could have been left on the cutting room floor without too much impact.

Also, similarly to We Will Always Love You, the songs here are overwhelming either great or completely ignorable, albeit the ratio is much better than before. Since I got done talking about the bad, I'll focus on the good songs, and again there's quite a few here. As mentioned, the beginning of this album has tracks like Every Single Weekend and Blue Shadows where the Avalanches really hit their stride, as both feel like classic Avalanches tracks. The Pavements Light, while outside of the usual fare, is still a great ambient track that feels like it fits into the glossier computer aesthetic of the late 2000s. To round it out, Can't Get Over Losing You is the best song on the album, and a serious contender for my song of the year, The initial drop hits incredibly hard thanks to how heavy the drums land and how much drive they contribute to the track. The back half is a real masterpiece as the track slows down for long enough, partially to centre Portraits of Tracy who does a great job, but also so that the return of the hook hits twice as hard. I've cried to this song at least 16 times, and that's because I've listened to it 16 times.

I can't iterate enough how good the songs are. I'm going to spend most of my time griping about how the vibes are all wrong here, but I want to stress now this album is still more good than bad. To cover some other songs from here, I Give Everything I Have 2 U is a wonderfully catchy song that feels perfect for a party, All The Time In The World is another Rivers Cuomo cut with stunning instrumentation, although I still think Cuomo is out of his element on an Avalanches song. Vida is a super exciting return to the sounds of Wildflower, carrying a beat structured for hip-hop but with more fun, dance-worthy musical stylings. That is all to say the first half of this album is genuinely powerful.

It's now in critiquing this album that I'm faced with the burden of describing what made the Avalanches special. I've seen people say they make music that "sounds like you've always known it" or that it sounds like a treasured memory. Something about their music just makes it sound like the only thing you should be listening to, something so big and interwoven with humanity you can’t turn away, and I think the twinge of melancholy in their music always made it so. Since I Left You, for example, is lyrically a sad song about someone feeling lost after a breakup, and the combination of a sad topic with such inexorably happy vibes gives it that importance. Beyond that, in reaching across time, the music reaches across space and creates tunes that feel somehow interwoven with humanity, that in their act of looking at the past for sounds the Avalanches unearthed a nexus through which the power of music flows. Some songs on here like Blue Shadows and Can’t Get Over Losing You carry that vibe, but unfortunately this is the most ignorable the Avalanches have ever been. As for why, you can certainly point a finger at Szekeres, a non-plunderphonician who began working with the group coincidentally as they released their worst album, who has now officially joined the band and thus has even more power to bend an album to his will. He is the new guy after all.

But honestly, I don't think it's Szekeres. This album turned out better than We Will Always Love You, which wouldn't make sense if Szekeres had gotten more involved by joining between albums. If I had to guess, I think this album was a great risk gone wrong. The Avalanches stepped out of their comfort zone and looked to the present instead of the past, and in doing so leaned on the present too much to where the past that flowed through them got lost. I say this because the features are more present than they've ever been. On We Will Always Love You, the features usually were just contributing their voice or helping during songwriting, but it was still cohesive. Here, the features are getting a lot more involved in the songwriting (maybe, I wasn't sitting in on the recording sessions) and it means the album breaks up somewhat. Even though songs like Far Away and Can't Get Over Losing You are great, they clash sonically with the 80's themes, and they clash with many of the other tracks because the soul heavy inspiration is still super obvious, especially in the second half.

The back half of this album gets a section of its own, because wow does the fun train ride come to a screeching halt. After Can't Get Over Losing You comes Highfield, an alright song that carries the energy well and should set up the new direction perfectly. Instead, tracks 20-26 dawdle around in a haze of mediocrity. There are some moments that are alright, but all the songs from here until the title track are more or less pointless. One More Fantasy is an awesome track with synths reminiscent of classic 80s pop and a powerfully contrasting beat drop only to be marred by the vocal sample killing the momentum. Near the end isn't much better, as after a great title track and a great Barry Can't Swim feature comes Total Recall, a horrible mess of nothingness that decides to drag on for longer than any other track. That's partially because the tracks here are short, with none exceeding 4 minutes and only one past the 3.5-minute mark. This is a big departure and one I don't think works well, as the short songs can be almost hypnotically dull at times.

Broadly, I think the direction for this album was split in a few directions. I've been describing this album as based in 80s tech optimism, but by Chater's admission; the album is about how old storage devices preserve memories and...about how advertising shapes you as a person. Except for a few mock ads, I did not feel this idea coming across in the music at all. The music videos paint a similar picture, but again a picture you probably wouldn't pick up just from the music. Even Szekeres said the project got away from them, although that was in relation to their very involved marketing project for the album which is fun but not related enough to the album to spend words on. These themes of advertising and memory are actually interesting, and looking at the little memories that are designed to wriggle their way into our minds would be cool, but the Avalanches merely dip their toes in to the marriage of the ideas and barely address the advertising angle at all in the music. The most fun they have with it is the use of a Sesame Street segment delivered by Suzanne Ciani, who made the "Pop n Pour" sound that got used for a while. Just the memory ideas are good though, but they're stuck taking a backseat at times to the Avalanches newfound jingle obsession.

Altogether, I think this is a good example of a good album with good songs failing to come together into a cohesive product. The ideas behind this project were full of possibilities, and none of them were quite explored to a satisfying conclusion. Even then, there's enough songs worth revisiting that I'll surely have No Bad Memories of this album.