The International Space Orchestra

Wow.  Just wow.  The Avalanches take it to a whole new level.

The Avalanches

Following We Will Always Love You, a second new single, Running Red Lights, has been released from The Avalanches upcoming album.

The song features vocals by Weezer's Rivers Cuomo and most notably, some lines from David Berman's Darkness and Cold by Alabama-born rapper Pink Siifu.  I don't know if it's deliberate or not, but Pink gets the lines wrong. The protagonist in Darkness and Cold sleeps in a "band-aid pink Chevette" while his ex-lover goes out with someone else in a "champagne-pink Corvette,"  The rapper Pink has them both in champagne-pink Corvettes.  

But no matter, it's still a touching tribute and gives the late Berman a posthumous writing credit on The Avalanches new album. 

The Avalanches

Pure fantasy to help us forgot, at least temporarily, the bitter disappointments in the real world.

"Really?"

First of all, in 1977 and '78, I was dating a girl who went to Fordham University in The Bronx and therefore passed through the Fordham Rd. subway station a lot, so this video has a certain nostalgic appeal to me.  

The principal sample for Because I'm Me is from a 1959 Smithsonian Folkways anthology titled Street and Gangland Rhythms: Beats and Improvisations by Six Boys in Trouble, consisting of songs by 11- and 12-year-old boys from housing projects in New York, although you might not recognize the song at first as The Avalanches rearranged the sequence of lines from the original to fit their own composition.

The horn arrangements are from The Honey Cone's 1971 Want Ads.  I know it says "1969" below, but that's when the album featuring Want Ads was first released - the single hit No. 1 in 1971 (trust me, I know, I was alive then).

The Avalanches

A Yellow Submarine-style psychedelic video for The Avalanches' song Subway.  Don't try too hard to follow along or make sense of it, just get on board for the trippy ride.

For the uninitiated, Australia's The Avalanches compose their songs entirely from samples of other music ("plunderphonics").  It's harder than it sounds, and to give you an idea of what they're doing, listen to the two primary sources of samples on Subway.  The first is a 1980 song called Subways by Chandra, an adolescent post-punk band fronted by 12-year-old Chandra Oppenheim.  Chandra's debut EP, Transportation, featured paranoid undertones, large doses of Farfisa organ, and occasional melodica solos, and remains to this day a brilliant artifact of the early-80’s New York club scene.

The Avalanches chose to back Chandra's vocals with samples from English pop rocker Graham Bonnet's Warm Ride.  The Bee Gees originally penned Warm Ride in 1978 for the movie Saturday Night Fever, but it got cut and recorded instead by Bonnet, who was a bigger success in Australia than anywhere else in the world.

There's a bunch of other stuff thrown in there too, including the "Na-na-na-nas" heard at the 1:32 mark, which is from The Bar-Kays' 1971 Sang and Dance, and the "Hey, yo, girls!" heard at the 2:19 mark from 2009's Born 2 B Fly by The Fly Girlz, another teen-girl band from New York.