The Daily Spin, June 2
The Avalanches | Wildflower
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: Wildflower (2016)
Artist: The Avalanches
Link:
Sampling is an art unto itself, the way that artists will pick segments of another song, of spoken word, of… well, most anything, and weave that into their own music to create something new. It’s recycling at its purest, turning aged sound into something vitalizing.
Where Wildflower excels, particularly, is the way it sweeps and bounces around the feature artists - with notables such as Danny Brown and Toro Y Moi, there’s something to be said for the way that it builds to support each artist in their flittering journey through the album - as brief as they might be in the grand scheme, it still feels like under this cohesive identity that makes this album distinctly Avalanche-like, there’s flavor in each track that settles a little easier on the chest.
The clear standout is the anthemic two-spot hitter, ‘Because I’m Me’, a vaguely swinging jazz-like tune that pivots a gorgeous string sample under a childlike vocal into a bombastic track that explodes into the space given, filling it with a sparkling melancholy that ties Camp Lo’s snappy lyrics into beautiful knots, embroidery of feeling the whole way through.
Of their three albums I’m most familiar with, this is the one that introduced me to the group - and though at this point, on the whole, it may be my least favorite of them all, there’s no denying the absolute magic at your fingertips the whole way through this.
Rating: 9.1/10
Best Tracks: Because I’m Me
Worst Tracks: Zap!