The Avalanches' 'No Bad Memories' Is a Jingle-Powered Masterpiece of Joyful Salvage
Somewhere around 2020, Robbie Chater sold his record collection. “Up until 2020, I had a lifetime collection of around 15,000 records that I’d sampled on all our previous albums, and then I made a big decision to get rid of them all, except for maybe 200 that were very dear to me.” What replaced the crates was the advertising of childhood — audio logos, start-up sounds, TV spots. Chater on why they work: “They’re so sticky, especially start-up sounds, audio logos and stuff like Nokia phone ringtones — they were very handy to cut up, program and begin making our own melodies out of.” The album title itself is lifted from a 1980s floppy disk ad.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: glue over gloss. Chater mixes as he goes rather than reassembling later: “I’ll mix as I go, split the tracks out of my Mac to a mixing desk and push them through the mix bus to get some glue.” The low end on “Together” is literally hardware — the rhythm track uses the sound of old hard drives, under a children’s chorus sampled from a 1970s television adaptation of The Famous Five. The Spatial Dynamics: bitcrushing and EQ in place of the old Akai sampler’s outputs, with Chater reaching for an obscure distortion plugin called Frohmage to push samples “into that sweet spot.” Now a trio with Andy Szekeres of Midnight Juggernauts, they thread twenty-one guests — Karen O, Jamie xx, Panda Bear, Mike Patton, Haruomi Hosono — through it without any of it reading as stunt casting.
Standout Performance
Tony Di Blasi, for the running order. Chater: “The sequencing of the tracks is almost the art form of what we do, and Tony plays a big role in that.” Their studio was “just a wall of whiteboards with 60 or 70 songs.” Thirty-one of them land in an order that flows.
Why It’s Certified
Variety’s Jem Aswad hears “some of their best songwriting to date” and calls it “one of the happiest-sounding albums you’ll hear all year.” Clash, awarding nine, calls it “an incredibly fresh dance record that mines memory, capitalism and ambient noise” and “a ride, and a gloriously disorientating one.” Record Collector’s entire verdict: “It’s outstanding.” Paste credits “an inventive, comprehensive sonic collage.” Aswad’s pick is “One More Fantasy,” which “pairs a Kraftwerkian loop with a soaring melody and high vocal from Carly Simon — it’s over much too soon.”