The Avalanches Create Another Sample-delic Pop Masterpiece With ‘No Bad Memories’: Album Review

By Jem Aswad

Jem Aswad

Executive Editor, Music

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Without overstating the case, when the Avalanches’ debut album “Since I Lost You” arrived out of a clear blue sky (to anyone outside of their native Australia, anyway) in 2000, its impact was like the arrival of the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” eleven years earlier: a mind-melting leap forward in the art of sampling, a sprawling and densely textured opus created from a reported 3,500 samples (and no live instrumentation) ranging from Madonna’s “Borderline” to old soul songs to deeply obscure tracks, along with snippets of commercials, film scores, movie or tv dialogue (particularly the “That boy needs therapy” line in “Frontier Psychiatrist”) and heaven knows what else.

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