âWelcome to the Party at the End of the World!!!
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.
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 FâŻAâŻâ 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 naĂŻve. 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 naĂŻvety. 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.â