fuck boys i just wanna dance

[pragueyeah]

“Even if you haven't heard this exact album before, you've surely heard a majority of its trends and themes. The music charts of the early 2010s were filled with longing jingles and echo-doused whooping vocalizations that seem to have largely vanished from the industry, and listening back to them now creates a strange nostalgia for flashbacks and feelings that might not even be real. Trevor Powers, better known as Youth Lagoon, was just a teenager when he released his debut album, but since then it has become a hallmark of everything that we miss about a decade we recently said farewell to. There's a sense of optimism throughout The Year of Hibernation that's easy to pick up on through its sentimental lo-fi crunches of percussion claps and its intimate recording setting that lets the album live up to its bedroom pop label in a most literal fashion. As predictable and passive as some of them are, these amateurish songs use Trevor's passion for reverb to their advantage in such a way that his singing never feels as if it's being performed from far away but rather as a representation of attainable dreams and goals that are soon to be reached. The record approaches instrumental progression with this tone as well, at all times moving onward and upward with skittering synthesizer and upbeat whistle melodies that make every song worthy of being overlaid onto a montage of coming-of-age film scenes or phone-captured good memories from a light-hearted and free childhood. They serve as conduits for recollections of sun-dappled picnic blankets, evening birdsong, and an irreplaceable teenage wanderlust. Just like the cover's authentic photo of a Hawaiian vacation cliffside and a washed-out splash of rainbow light leaks, The Year of Hibernation is a charmingly good-natured form of transport back to whatever life that each of us were living back in 2011. It's an album that will always feel like a safe place, a reminder of former happy times whenever we might not be enjoying our experiences in our current stage of life and reality.”

[pragueyeah]

“The sound of the big city amplified to feverish heights, like endless trains rolling over your body while all the cars are slamming on their horn, the cold of the winter is freezing your limbs off and people are screaming at you to get the hell up you gotta get through this somehow. The lyrics of young people just wanting to punch a hole into all of this garbage that is thrown at them at all times at light speed while just trying to get by in any way possible. Hearts thumping in a rhythm too fast for themselves to keep on that way. Everything is spiraling out of control, and all you are seemingly able to do is participate in it? Hell no. Days work for days pay. It's not fair, so you don't have to fight fair either. Just fight.”

[pragueyeah]

“I first heard this seven years ago during the summer of 13 at university in London. Nights that never seemed to end. Canary wharf skyline caught by the evening sun as we left the park from playing footie. Red stripe and house parties. Spliffs and girls in summer dresses. The feeling that anything could happen, that adventure waited at every turn.”

[pragueyeah]

The deeper tragedy of pining for lost youth is that you're actively wasting the moment you're in, and one day you'll look back and wonder where that time went too.

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand… once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

[pragueyeah]

“House music is party music. It’s good times. Carefree good times. It’s supposed to invoke the feelings of those late nights where you don’t feel tired and just want to GO. Go here, do this. Drink this. Dance to that song. Comparatively, it’s those hot summer days with the sun beating down on your scorched shoulders. At the beach, chasing after a volleyball. Or in the park, throwing around the ball with your friends and sipping a cider. And if that’s the goal of House, then this album is the quintessential achievement in the genre for the past generation. What an amazing, tender, entirely fun journey. I cannot stress this enough: this album is FUN. Absolutely fun. If “Since I Left You” by the Avalanches is the soundtrack to chasing a girl around the world, in and out through parties and diners and taxis, then “Charmed” is that first step out into the world when you’ve found your love. Hand in hand, enigmatic ever-consuming infatuation and excitement all around you. The world opens it arms to you and everything is easy. Difficulties slip away. Good times. Happy times. Party times. I’ve refused to make any of my music listening specific to the pandemic. It’s my one safe haven, and I believe it should be safe from attachment to this entirely tragic and ongoing worldwide struggle. But listening to this album of warm hugs from better times (past and to come) makes me feel so very hopeful. And we can all do with more of that these days.”

[pragueyeah]

“Statement music for the hip and happenin' 20-something year old (or the aspiring one) who dreams of a noble lifetime of leaning back and doing exactly nothing.  And I mean that in the highest esteem.  How could I not? Those of us who dream of a future in which we simply glide around effortlessly (and those goals are attained with little to no exerted work) finally have a soundtrack.  Sure, it's a pretty unrealistic dream, but it's a beautiful one.  Just sitting around all day, occasionally feeling soft grass on our bare feet and the warm sun on our shoulders is something Lost Horizons will never allow us to lose sight of.  I for one am thankful for Lost Horizons's world where there are no bills to pay, no alarm clocks to set, no interest rates to be fearful of, and no job performance reviews.”

[pragueyeah]

“Welcome to the Party at the End of the World!!!

Hey, mate. You made it!

We're all so pleased to see you.

Everyone's here and there are cold beers in the fridge and there's good music playing and someone strung up an old disco ball and it looks kinda gaudy but the light that it bounces off the walls makes everyone look really beautiful. You sit down and exhale. Is it all over? Not quite. But, it will be soon. The buzz of conversation and the music fills the room. For a brief moment, you forget about everything that's happened to you. The light of the disco ball glances through the haze of cigarette smoke and it looks like everyone is moving in slow-motion. It's like they're angels dancing in front of the full moon. Thousands of miles above you, the stars twinkle and glimmer in deep space. They give light to the darkness. They're still there and they're still shining. And you're still here and you're still shining.

What a beautiful album.

I'm going to begin this review by stating what everyone else has already said: this album came at the perfect time. It's been a horrible year. The worst thing about this year has been the silence. The radio static that filled our ears as we stayed inside for another month and then another month and then another month. The words that Orono Noguchi recites at the beginning of this album feel way too close to home.

"It's hard really, being you know, like so far apart and all this distance and the silence, you know?"

And in this horrible year, we listened to a lot of music that was sad and depressing. From my side, I rediscovered the overwhelming existential terrors of Giles Corey and F♯A♯∞ and I wish that I could wipe the memories of listening to these albums, which are so tainted now. In the face of existential horror, it is too easy to retreat into the doom and wallow in despair. The precipice of the cliff seems to be the only option if you stare at for long enough.

But what can we do? Isn't doom and despair the only option? Is there a horizon beyond the towering grey clouds of isolation and depression? Is there a brighter tomorrow where a big, beautiful sun shines and we get our lives back?

Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi think that there is. They've spent their entire careers trying to show us.

We need a little bit of optimism. We need someone to hold our hand and give it a squeeze. But there's so, so much more to this album than that. Because this isn't just a bookmark at the end of a dreadful year. When the hellscape of 2020 is just a distant memory, this album will still be there and it will still be beautiful. This is a record to pay tribute to all the angels out there. This is a love song to all our friends. This is a tribute to all those moments where things turned out to be okay. This is a reminder that there's a life beyond the horizon.

Since I Left You was an album about youth and so the optimism that was found in those songs was buoyant, exuberant, and somewhat naïve. Wildflower was an album that was haunted by the echoes of its predecessor. In Wildflower, the energies of one's teenage life are being constantly relived and revisited through the prism of nostalgia. By contrast, We Will Always Love You is a mature, ponderous album. After two decades, Robbie and Tony admit that they are getting old. A lot of the energy that propelled Since I Left You has dissipated into the cosmos, and instead, We Will Always Love You unravels with a kind of patience that seems almost antithetical to the bouncy exuberance of Since I Left You. Indeed, the most beautiful thing about We Will Always Love You is that it is an album scarred with pain and hardship. It wears its age on its sleeve. And that is exactly what makes its message so powerful. Robbie and Tony say to us: after all these years, there's hope. There's happiness out there. Since I Left You was a fantastic spasm of youthful naïvety. Wildflower was an LSD-induced closed-eye hallucination and so it always seemed escapist and unreal. But We Will Always Love You is simultaneously the most grounded and the most otherworldly album of The Avalanches' discography. It is grounded because it acknowledges the pains and sadnesses of real life in a way that the previous two albums didn't. But it uses the shared melancholia of our lives as a springboard to explore transcendental, unifying human truths. I do not think that We Will Always Love You is escapist because it doesn't seek to escape but it does seek to overcome. There is no cowardice here. No retreat.

There's bravery when The Avalanches acknowledge Orono Noguchi's cries of isolation and respond with an affirmation of unconditional love in We Will Always Love You. That song isn't a happy song, mind you. The proclamation of love is tinged with the wistful melancholia of distance and regret. But that is what makes it real. There's incredible bravery when they confront the passing of David Berman in Dial D for Devotion and Running Red Lights and reply to his death with a beautiful, haunting tribute to the indefatigable perseverance of the human spirit. There's bravery in the lyrics of The Divine Chord, where Andrew VanWyngarden tries to overcome his heartbreak and sorrow with a message of self-actualisation. It's a sad song but its one that is clear-eyed and sober. However, we aren't allowed to wallow in the melancholia, as we did throughout the rest of this year. Instead, we acknowledge it and move forwards.

At the end of each song is an overwhelming tenderness; eternal and endless love.

So, Interstellar Love is a perfect narrative anchor to the first half of the album. It counters the melancholic turn of The Divine Chord with a wonderful salute to our tireless ability to live for our friends despite the overwhelming horror of existence. In a similar fashion, Oh The Sunn! and Music Makes Me High celebrates the ability of music to erase human differences and unify us in song. These songs are constructed to sound vast and expansive and overwhelming in order to emphasise the transcendentality of these truths: we do not simply overcome the hardships of our own lives, but we overcome the traumas of the universe itself. We do not simply love each other but we love the whole of the human race. The party is small and cramped but the walls fall away and all of human history presents itself as a long, endless dance. And Wherever You Go shows us that the infinite dance of humankind moves in tandem with our step and supports us. Wherever we may be, wherever you are. Our friends and family are out there and they love us. Is this message corny? Is it kind of sappy? Overly sentimental? We are tempted to think so. In the post-post-ironic era, we're cautious towards open expressions of sentimentality. We've been poisoned by the doom and gloom of the past year. It seems like we've listened to way too many sad albums to ever crawl back from the precipice of the cliff. But that's what makes this entire album so amazing. It disarms you with its embrace. In this way, it's kind of like watching an old Christmas movie. At first, you might roll your eyes. But you might find yourself tearing up during the next verse, much to the chagrin of your otherwise impenetrable sense of cynicism.

And as the basslines swell and the choruses flutter into place, you might join the angels in front of the moon. The cosmological enormity of The Avalanches' music makes every dance seem like the last one. So, the Party at the End of the World continues to march on. The pale moonlight shutters in between us as we dance, silhouetting the shape of our bodies against the swirling glow of the galaxies with every movement. In a way, each moment of the dance is caught in the web of time forever.

Welcome to the Party at the End of the Universe!!!

All of your friends are here. They made it too. It is summer in Australia and the night is warm and the stars are still shining. Tonight, we will celebrate making it through this horrendous year. But we will celebrate more than that: we celebrate our friends, we celebrate life. The most wonderful moments of our lives often pass in a blink of an eye and we don't even realise it. Not this time. Not while I can still hear these songs.”

[pragueyeah]

“a moment crystallized in time... a vibe. obama-era hope and an irresistible hook canonized into a million little experiences: kid cudi taking acid and vibing at coachella, the first time you ever heard about acid, the way her hair looked when she put the little yellow flowers in it. i can't debate here whether this is a perfect song, but i can say that it feels like there's a definite break between every second before you've heard this and every second after”

[pragueyeah]

“Is my version an elaborate prank, am I hallucinating, or is there actually a fucking extended Modern Lovers in the first minute of this album? Like, this weird, slinky, almost beatless banger, all takeout food and suffocation, gets its start with a nod to Jonathan fucking Richman? Like, don't we need to discuss that? Actually, we don't– it's just another instance of M.I.A. rolling a cranial encyclopedia of what pop music can and should do into one of the most perfect sounds ever waxed. Big city sprawl, block party bray, nightclub claustrophobia, a thousand dancers feeling each other happen across the globe, static electricity, jagged pink fluorescence, Chuck D's booming authority and Snoop Dogg's sensuous swagger, Lady Gaga's eccentricity and Ke$ha's ragged exuberance, Bob Dylan's distorted cool and David Byrne's jitters– and she sounds, of course, absolutely nothing like any of those six. Every idea, no matter how exaggerated and irrational, works– because every idea sounds like M.I.A., like the unfathomable power and sweetness of her persona are hissing in your ear, like one of the most uncompromising visions in music is taking form in the back of your brain, a vision at once unshakably focused and broad enough to welcome Jonathan (fucking) Richman.”

[pragueyeah]

“anyway we got rid of time and we set up in this big circular beach house with a terrace that goes all the way around it and when you go out on the terrace you see people coming by the boatfull, laughing and dancing under the gulls, and i don't know how they all get in here but they do and we can all feel them because when they come in it's like a symphony swelling up with new melodies and your awareness of the place getting more crowded is just a sort of joy at the knowledge that more and more friends are showing up and there's no sense of the place getting narrower or hotter and all we ever do really is dance, there's one wide rippling sheet of us, and there's only motion and color forever and ever and it's strange to say that i'm seventeen because i used to think that that presupposed a forthcoming eighteenth year and a withered sixteenth, but that's not the way things work here, and i'm everyone in those boats and i'm everyone in this house and the shaking of the bass and the smile on your lips and the gulls in the clean air”

[pragueyeah]

“thousands of dwarves deep in the center of the earth, vigorously working in a mechanical factory, trying to sing the day away”

[pragueyeah]

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/2010s-chillwave-best-coast-washed-out-neon-indian/

the historizing of something i so directly experienced is jarring to say the least. the perspective and analyses in the article are insightful, but to frame it such - the 2010s, fuck - really emphasizes the temporal distance for me. where did the years go? a tale as old as time.

going into the next decade, i hope i’m able to make aging feel less uncomfortable.

[pragueyeah]

“Only two words can stop Bruno now. The two words that could bring his empire of perfectly executed genre studies crashing to the ground. Three syllables that could so easily dismantle his kingdom of tasteful nostalgia: Be yourself. Tear down any and all motivational posters you come across Mr. Mars. I say this with a world of love in my heart: you should, emphatically, not be yourself. Keep on wearing the skins of yesteryear's pop empresarios with the effortlessness you exhibit here and elsewhere. Keep on counting those Grammys. Because the last thing we want to do is get to know the real you. We're quite sure we don't like the real you. But that's fine, we like the people you pretend to be. "Finesse" is of course noticeable for being an island of '90s nostalgia in an ocean of '80s recollections. The transition between the two has been slowly making itself more apparent in recent years. Indeed we feel stuck in that musical limbo that was the early '90s at present. Perhaps no fad characterised that limbo better than New Jack Swing. This is a bop, no question, and one made all the better by the addition of Cardi B. Cardi B is someone whom you imagine only knows how to be herself, and is certainly one of the most refreshing personalities in pop at the moment. I've got 10 doubloons that says the next stop on memory lane involves G-Funk.”

[pragueyeah]

"A sublime half hour of coked out 70s disco groove. Sonically perfect. Test speakers and drugs with this."

[pragueyeah]

a great measure of a life well lived is when your friends produce an elegy that bangs like this

[pragueyeah]

my heart beats in four to the floor

[pragueyeah]

“It's like they took 2019 trap and turned it into a 2006 scene hit you'd add to your myspace page rather than the other way around... art --> culture or culture --> art? a question we've been trying to answer for many, many years.”