The Chinese Democracy Award for Record that Refuses to Drop

The Avalanches’ Second Album

The Avalanches were supposed to release the follow-up to CMG-proclaimed #1 Album of the Aughts Since I Left You (2000) this year. I think they were also supposed to release it last year and probably the last couple years before that, too. A lot of you will agree with me when I say that this long-gestation period is a special kind of torture. There is nothing else in the world like Since I Left You. We dare not hope that any other artistic entity beside the Avalanches help us out with that one, nor should they, and I think most musicians are on the same page as us because no one has really tried. The sample-gorged, ecstatic, eye-on-the-beatific vision of Avalanches is more than their intellectual property, it’s their spiritual possession, too. Their language is so distinctively their own, for anyone else to speak it would probably sound silly, like cats barking. But that’s what the Avalanches do—they are cats barking, whales mooing, people figuring out how to make every other sound in the world communicate the deepest, warmest sort of assurance of the inherent need we have for music, for art. Their debut was both practical and metaphysical party record and that’s huge; their music turns the world upside down and in so doing helps the world make more sense.

That we only have one album of this deepest, warmest assurance feels both temporarily appropriate and perpetually cruel. I love the new Kanye but can only imagine how much I would love the new Kanye as a fragmented, disembodied, hallowed piece of cultural detritus floating in the vast whirlpool of some new Avalanches track along with samples of everything else connected to Kanye and beyond—and that would be like the first two minutes or so before the change-up. For record round two Wikipedia, somewhat out of character but not really, weaves mythos, whispering about how Darren Seltmann talked about transforming the record from “ambient world music” into something more party while in 2006 Modular hyped something that couldn’t possibly be close to a finished record (or it better not be) as more than they could have hoped for and then in 2007 the band released a statement about it being “much more hip-hop than you might expect” at which point Clay and I swooned our balls off and then updates were happening to the website and there was some crazy cool mix thing up on Myspace for a minute and for sure it was coming in 2010 and now we’re at the end of 2010, squinting at 2011, wondering if anything is real.

And I can only ask, please, let it be real. It needs to be real. It may sound childish, but I need to believe that, someday, I will be listening to a second Avalanches record. And on that day I will quack like a frog.