The Avalanches’ Melbourne Show Was A Glorious Homecoming, Even If They Pissed Off Some Fans
The Avalanches celebrated and reframed their legacy on Friday - but one big omission left fans confused.
The third album by The Avalanches, We Will Always Love You, arrived as a glimmer of light at the end of a long, dark, COVID-infected tunnel.
Its boundless optimism was a panacea for the Australian music community still reeling from its annus horribilis and it was a surprise to no one that the pair nabbed the Australian Music Prize. I think I can speak for a lot of people in Australia when I say we fucking needed it.
So this show at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl was a sort of homecoming. The beatnik punk kids turned sampling extraordinaires playing a sold-out gig in their hometown to kick off a month-long victory lap of the East Coast. Their performance was a celebration, not just of their music, but of the things we had all taken for granted.
For many in attendance it was the first time they had danced in public for over a year or hugged their friends and shouted inane lyrics into the sky like, “running, running red lights, red lights, red lights, I been running red lights to get to you.” Such simple pleasures are amplified when emboldened by the collective manic energy of ten thousand bodies just grateful to be feeling a bass line reverberate through their ribcage.
Surrounded by an audiophile’s banquet of gear, Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi opened the show with ‘The Divine Chord’, a song that in so many ways encapsulated the elation of the evening. With the dreamlike guitar line of Johnny Marr playing over the celestial beauty of The Shirelles’ sample of ‘It’s Love That Really Counts’, it truly made us all feel like we were floating in space.
When Music Junkee spoke to the boys in December last year they said they wanted to “bring it back to the art form of sampling where we started…it will be nice if people could see us deconstructing the songs, putting them back together and almost revealing the elements that went into making them.”
And from the mix between The Shirelles’ 1962 Burt Bacharach classic into the Since I Left You era single ‘Electricity’, you could see The Avalanches reposition their live show as an Australian answer to 2ManyDJs — not like the often gauche Girl Talk knock offs who would sandwich ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in between ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Hollaback Girl’ — this was a more refined journey between The Avalanches’ three albums and the influences behind them.
From an extended edit of the gospel choir track ‘The Conquest Song’ by Ernest Fowler and Voices of Conquest which permeates through ‘Oh The Sunn!’ they mixed into their own single ‘Interstellar Love’ before splicing it with The Beach Boys ‘God Only Knows’. It was fascinating to watch the chemistry of the duo’s musical brains in action as they allowed Leon Bridges to momentarily harmonise with Carl Wilson. Only two people in Australia could pull that off and they were standing behind the decks on stage in Kings Domain.
Channelling their electronic progenitors Underworld, they went deep for ‘Overcome’ before layering the vocals of ‘If I Was A Folkstar’ over the top for some techno karaoke. And while on paper the setlist seemed to balance their back catalogue quite evenly, there was no denying the fact that this was a celebration of We Will Always Love You and a deliberate re-framing of their legacy.
Deep cuts from their debut like ‘Live at Dominoes’, ‘Flight Tonight’ and ‘A Different Feeling’ seemed to be included as filler, high-quality filler of course; but used as a vehicle for the duo to transition from set piece to set piece and more recent tracks like ‘Music Makes Me High’ and ‘Take Care In Your Dreaming’ were treated as the guests of honour.
But it was the joy in which each song was deconstructed that made the moments count. They paid homage to their latest muse Karen Carpenter before ‘We Go On’ was given centre stage and the outro of Queen’s ‘I Want To Break Free’ mixed into ‘Running Red Lights’ was a move so bombastically Spinal Tap that Rivers Cuomo would’ve smiled.
Strangely by the time ‘Because I’m Me’ arrived towards the end of the night you’d be forgiven if you’d forgotten Wildflower even existed, save for ‘The Wozard Of Iz’ and their remix of ‘Subways’ the album was largely left on the cutting room floor for the night. Even ‘Frankie Sinatra’ — their comeback single, the first song they released after a sixteen-year hiatus didn’t make an appearance.
But this oddity would be nothing compared to the almighty snub at the end of the evening. The non-encore. Picture the scene, the pair predictably but gloriously drop ‘Since I Left You’ to an ecstatic crowd, in what is a fitting end to a powerhouse DJ megamix that had somehow played both the theme to Willy Wonka and ‘Halcyon and On and On’ by Orbital.
You check your watch. There’s seven minutes left until the 11pm curfew. Plenty of time for Robbie and Tony to go backstage, give each other a slap on the back, take a sip of their organic kombucha and then walk back on stage to a ravenous crowd bellowing for their return. They drop ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ as the cherry on their cake, the crowd completely loses it and everyone goes home with a smile on their dial. But they don’t. They don’t come back. The house lights slowly come on and the gig is over. And the people are rightly stunned.
Every group were having the same conversation and were at a different point in their theory as to why it wasn’t played.
Now, who are we to demand an artist play any particular song? There’s a case to be made that we should just be happy with what we witnessed and not be petulant children complaining about not getting dessert after the delicious meal that was served to us. But it was undeniably strange. And as people shuffled towards the exit of Sidney Myer Music Bowl, it seemed every group were having the same conversation and were at a different point in their theory as to why it wasn’t played. It’s arguably their most famous song.
And without commenting on The Avalanches’ artistic choice, it was unquestionably a poor decision, because instead of the lasting message of the night being their triumphant live return, it left a hanging question in many mouths wanting to know why. And understandably so, for a band that has played in their hometown less than five times this century, there undoubtedly was a lot of people in the crowd who had been waiting a very long time to imitate a parrot.
So for those people it was a bit of a heartbreaker, but something else about the decision is perplexing. The Avalanches have made quite a song and dance about the 20th anniversary of their debut album. They are currently promoting the sale of a $120, 4 LP Deluxe Edition of Since I Left You across their socials and they recently accepted an offer to be the inaugural Luminary Artists In Residence of the Illuminate Adelaide Festival where they will perform the album in full with the city’s Symphony Orchestra later this year.
So to then not play one of the album’s most loved tracks when fans have forked out over $100 for the gig? That’s a tough one. It’s understandable they don’t want to forever be defined by ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ and personally I think their most recent album means they never will be. But not playing it has meant it has taken up three paragraphs in this review instead of a sentence.
Chris Lewis is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. He is on Twitter.
Photo Credit: Alexandra Drewniak