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.
There's a lot I can say about the new Avalanches single, We Will Always Love You. Or maybe there isn't a lot I could say, but either way it doesn't matter because whatever I say would be inadequate compared to what they themselves have to say:
Sometimes we receive a message. Telling us our music has been there; through dark times, loneliness, loss.
There are no words to express how moving or profound this connection with you is.
Because the music was born out of such moments itself, and so it is felt, by those with open hearts, on the same wavelength it was first created.
Morse Code beamed and received by hearts and hearts alike.
Our new record is about such journeys, from darkness to light.
About life after (all kinds of) death. About the transcendent nature of music itself.
Every voice ever played on the radio over the last 100 years now exists in the stars; the transmissions of these singers are forever floating around out there, lost in the cosmos, endlessly travelling.
Tonight Smokey Robinson duets with Dev Hynes and The Roches.
Those spirits are out there.
We are each a tune, floating in space
And this one's for you.
The Avalanches employ pluderphonics, sampling existing recorded music in lieu of producing their own to create something new and original. The principal sample for We Will Always Love You comes from Smokey Robinson & The Miracles's I'll Take You Any Way That You Come. The Roches and the Australian Boys Choir also make appearances.
Peach Pit are from Vancouver, British Columbia, but other than that I don't know too much about them. Their sound is characterized by a soft spoken vocal style over guitar-driven rock melodies and has been described as sad pop and surf rock. According to their Wikipedia page, they've worn "the same clothes for every live performance since buying them for their first music video shoot," so there's that. Apparently, they're popular enough that they're headlining at Terminal West on May 5.
Shampoo Bottles is about the personal belongings and other detritus left behind after the end of a relationship. How long do you wait before throwing out that other toothbrush? The lyrics are generally universal but the video by Lester Lyons-Hookham considers several different specific scenarios for the end of a relationship, including the scattering of ashes at the shore.
Nandi Rose Plunkett of the band Pinegrove also records as a solo singer-songwriter under the name Half Waif. The New Yorker described her music as "globe-twirling prism pop in search of a home."
On her song Ordinary Talk, she sings about the heaviness of ordinary moments, the tears and chores and self-doubt and small talk that comprise being a person.
"Recognizing your own ordinariness can be depressing, or it can be a relief. In Ordinary Talk, I wanted to honor and celebrate my ordinariness as an incredible tool for making me feel less alone. The song is a reassurance that feeling bad - or 'ill' - isn't something that needs to be corrected. There's a depth of experience that comes from feeling emotions at their extremes. And it is, in fact, this vivid, varied messiness that makes us human and ordinary."
The video, a collaboration with director Kenna Hynes, tracks the progression from isolation to communion as it moves from a troupe of theatrical characters to the neon lights of a house party.
