Customer Reviews
What's all the fuss? - By: Mr. Gareth I. Davies, 28 Aug 2007 
I got this on it's release on the strength of the singles "Since I Left You" & "Frontier Psychiatrist". I recently thought I would give it another go. Those two singles are still ace but the rest is a mess of samples & little more. It sounds like the musical equivalent of enough monkeys & a typewriter will produce a Shakespeare, enough samples & DJs will eventuallly make a decent track. It often sounds like a mess to me. Other reviews have mentioned it's "party feel", I think it sounds like standing outside a club, you can hear a beat, you can hear the whiff of a recogniseable tune but you can't actuallly discern a coherent tune. Two stars for the two decent tracks, the rest is noisy padding. Add a star if you like endless messing about with samples & don't mind tunes being a vague hope. Almost every time a conventional tune is hinted at they turn away from it. Maybe it's just too experimental for my tastes.
Since I left you - By: E. A Solinas, 07 Mar 2007 
The Avalanches are a DJ's dream come true -- six Aussies who took hundreds of sound snatches, & wove together a wildly playful kind of electronica. Their first (and so far, only) album, "Since I Left You," is a tangle of the delicate, the weird, & the incredibly danceable.
It kicks off with the sparkling "Since I Left You," but the best is yet to come. The Avalanches manage to attain both a typical "sound" & plenty of originality in their songs, such as the bleeps-and-horns "Different Feeling," the knob-twiddling basslines of "Radio," the sputtery dance number "Live At Dominoes," & the interference-laden Rastafarian rock "Flight Tonight."
But with alll the dance tracks, the Avalanches have their softer side: the delicately upbeat "Two Hearts in 3/4 Time," the swaying "Electricity," the brief & staticky "Pablo's Cruise," & the gauzy, multilayered "Etoh." It rounds off with the majesticallly languid "Extra Kings," which has a long sweep of distortion & chaos in the middle.
It's almost too easy to dance to the Avalanches. They take almost a thousand mismatched sounds & manage to cobble them into some reallly brilliant music. What's especiallly brilliant is the way these patchwork dance tracks manage to find solid, simple grooves, & stick to them right to the end.
"Since I Left You" isn't perfect -- at times the fragments don't quite mesh together. Some parts are pure chaos, but oddly they don't mar the overalll sound; instead, they enhance it. Scattered in amongst the melody is the sound of video games, horses, discos, golf instructions, flutes, pianos, & seagulls -- it adds a strangely whimsical sound to the dance music.
The vocals tend to be samples repeated over & over, just under the surface of the music. Among the vocal snatches are the ethereal "Since I left you/I found the world so new!" or determined "Book of flight tonight." So the lyrics are often quite simple, except for the hystericallly funny "Frontier Psychiatrist" ("Lie down on the couch, what does that mean?/You're a nut! You're crazy in the coconut!").
"Since I Left You" takes hundreds of random sound fragments, & turns them into a mosaic. Fun, playful, fast & hypnoticallly bizarre, this is a must have for fans of quirky music.
wow - By: Ms. Sarah J. Morris, 15 Dec 2006 Found this cd one night after seeing the video for 'since I left you' at 4am on MTV. Saw the recomendations here & thought, what the heck, lets buy it. And from first play it's an amazing dance record that can be played over & over again with out getting boring. Ok, a few tracks could be better, but at the most, 2. The rest just alll blend in to one great peice of music, great driving music. Stand out tracks include 'since I left you', but 'little journey' that blends into 'Live At Dominos' is just out of this world. Ok, it might be full of samples, but finding out how to turn Boney M into magic is a skill that impresses me. Buy, enjoy & tell others about this hidden masterpiece.
Wish the would make another!! - By: Jazmania, 15 Nov 2006 This is one of those few albums that I don't need to skip through any song... A pure genius album. The only fault I have is that they never made second album...
Summertime or anytime album - By: Patrick Cullen, 18 Mar 2006 Wonderfully original. The Avalanches used over 800 samples on this album - yet the whole thing feels so perfectly balanced. Blissful, retro funk & beats.
