We Will Always Love You

【輸入盤】
世界を熱狂させる、型破りな音楽異端者たちが帰ってきた!
16年ぶりに奇跡のカムバックを果たした前作『ワイルドフラワー』より約4年ぶりのニュー・アルバム!

After inducing the overstimulated feeling of rebounding in a carnival from heartbreak (Since I Left You) and soundtracking a summertime caravan across their native Australia (Wildflower), the Avalanches looked to space for their third album. More specifically, Robbie Chater and Toni Di Blasi became fascinated with the Golden Record, a kind of time capsule aboard NASAs Voyager spacecraft. Plans for a spoken contribution from the creative director of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project, Ann Druyan, fell through, but thats her on the album cover, her image from a television screen snapped by a camera and processed through a spectrograph. Druyans brain waves, recorded as she thought about Carl Sagan -- with whom she worked and fell in love during the project -- are on the Golden Record. Its that cosmic love story, as Chater put it, that guided the making of We Will Always Love You. Yet another emotional roller coaster, this is the Avalanches longest one yet, accommodating around 20 riders -- a number of featured artists that exceeds that of Wildflower -- and samples numbering in the hundreds. There is a strong connection to the previous trip with the Rivers Cuomo-fronted kaleidoscopic pop nugget Running Red Lights, a desperate romantic chase scene in which Pink Siifu also recites slightly remixed lyrics written by late Wildflower contributor David Berman: I sleep three feet above the street/In a pink champagne Corvette/Fly out into space/Listen to the music the stars are making/Without a flicker of regret. Those lines are representative of an album where so much happens -- in painstakingly connected and sometimes overlapping fashion -- that dozens of listens are required to process all the information. Cola Boyy and Mick Jones transmit from the indie disco of an interplanetary craft to pay tribute to Karen Carpenter on We Go On. Perry Farrell, backed by a spectral choir, does his musical healer thing, singing about love and light on another loping dancefloor groove. The biggest triumph is probably the graceful fusion of a looped line from the Alan Parsons Projects anti-surveillance soft-rock classic Eye in the Sky with a genuinely consoling original vocal from Leon Bridges, heard in the chugging Interstellar Love. The albums stronger dancefloor emphasis in relation to Wildflower is also felt throughout The Divine Chord, a collaboration with MGMT and Johnny Marr that evokes the same twirling, heart-aflutter daze as Since I Left You. Another clever aspect of the album is that the Avalanches make room for artists whose solo debuts made splashes big enough to be measured against all subsequent output. In addition to Sananda Maitreya (formerly known as Terence Trent DArby) and Tricky, theres Neneh Cherry, provider of the most urgent vocal through Wherever You Go, a call for togetherness with roots in early Chicago house. Overall, the guest artists are more attuned here with Chater and Di Blasi, who were seemingly burdened much more by sample licensing than by commercial expectations. Pocket some tissue and hold tight. ~ Andy Kellman

大人気チューン"Because I'm Me"などを輩出した2作目『Wildflower』から4年ぶりに届いたサード・アルバムだが、初作の後に16年の沈黙があったことを思えばかなり短いスパンということになる。資料によると今回は宇宙を舞台に〈絶え間ない波動で表される永遠の愛〉をテーマに制作されたとのことで、緻密なサンプリングも手伝って仕上がりは実に幻想的だ。MGMTとジョニー・マーを迎えてキュートな響きでまとめられた"The Divine Chord"をはじめ、リオン・ブリッジズ、ブラッド・オレンジ、サナンダ・マイトレヤ(テレンス・トレント・ダービー)、トリッキー、ジェイミーXX、デンゼル・カリー、カレンO、リヴァース・クオモ(ウィーザー)、ピンク・シーフら役者が揃うなか、日本からはコーネリアスが参加!
bounce (C)香椎恵