Essential New Music: The Avalanches’ “Wildflower”

To those for whom the Avalanches’ Since I Left You is the last will and testament of a bygone world—one in which the Twin Towers and long-playing recordings still, and always will, stand tall—finally dropping the needle on Wildflower, the madcap Australian pirates’ second LP, will be akin to glimpsing Bigfoot Jet-Skiing Nessie in the Bermuda Triangle while taking slugs of vampire blood from the Holy Grail.

Such is the delirium that a Godot-like wait can inflict upon a fan base. Babies born on the first album’s release date can drive to the record store for this follow-up—assuming their town has such a store. More likely, they will download it to their iDevice and skip straight to lead single “Frankie Sinatra,” the showiest and, in keeping with lead-single tradition, least representative track here. (Yes, it contains multiple Bacharach-to-the-future samples—exhumed calypso, “My Favorite Things”—but the Roger Rabbit hunt for Easter eggs is upstaged by Danny Brown’s caricatured, Girl Talk-y spotlight hog; poor MF Doom barely gets a word in edgewise.)

That “Sinatra” and “The Noisy Eater”—another Handsome Boy Modeling School ham bone tossed to Biz Markie—are the brainchildren of Jean-Michel Bernard is one of Wildflower’s only weaknesses; the French soundtrackeur deserves better than to be the one thing slipping up this trip on Gorillaz’ banana-peel discards. In sequence, both get subsumed into Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi’s master vision, a second cocktail-party fever dream that flits around a room chock-full of seamlessly anachronistic musical conversations. Camp Lo, meet Father John Misty and Jonathan Donahue; Toro Y Moi, say hello to Jennifer Herrema and Warren Ellis. Only “Because I’m Me,” with its staggering director’s cut of midcentury curio Six Boys In Trouble, bothers with an opening; only finale “Saturday Night Inside Out,” a spoken-word “motel masterpiece” by silver-tongued brethren Misty and David Berman, comes to a close.