10. The Avalanches - Since I Left You
Here’s a curious album: It’s constructed like a hip-hop record, it flows with the momentum of a great dance mix, but its component parts seem to come from strange places– musical soundtracks, oddball comedy routines, and easy-listening thrift-store pop from the 60s and 70s. It skirts cheese but hits the pleasure center of the music-geek brain dead-on, blurring lines we never knew existed: sunny lite-soul congeals into the surrealist coda from a John Cale song, flashes of Camp Lo and De La Soul mutter hooks over some unseemly alternate-reality disco, and a gothic choir gets chopped up and modulated to provide the wordless vocals of a funk jam that, as it turns out, is sourced from an especially dirty Blowfly single. Non sequiturs spring up even as all the musical patches hide their seams; “Frontier Psychiatrist” alone has enough bewildering decontextualized soundbites to count as some kind of deranged dada exercise (“And tighten your buttocks/ Pour juice on your chin/ And I promised my girlfriend I’d get/ A violin”). But Since I Left You isn’t just a well-built assemblage of sample-based plunderphonics, it’s a masterpiece of mood-setting that riffs off an ideal where getting on an airplane and landing in another corner of the world was the most exotic thing a person could do. It’s like a travelogue put through a Steinski filter, an escape to a world so new: “Get a drink, have a good time now, welcome to paradise.” –Nate Patrin / Pitchfork.com
