Longing To Be Rad, The Avalanches.

When news of a new recording from enigmatic Antipodean vanguardists The Avalanches dribbled through byte by byte, I was haphazardly linked into the highly questionable nonentity that is the Italian internet. Hogging what was most probably approximately an eighth of the entire country's bandwidth, I downloaded A Cowboy Overflow Of The Heart and it's been floating about my thoughts ever since. It had been over a decade since they'd released anything original (something of a contradiction, perhaps when considering the Victorian audio pirates' modus operandi) and longer still since Since I Left You, one of if not my favourite electronically flecked LP of all time, emerged amid a ripple. A ripple became a waterfall, and indeed it's had ears glued to the ground since in exasperated await. When the moment came, it did anything but disappoint; it quietly astounded. A simple monologue courtesy of once Silver Jews main man David Berman exudes poignancy ("I guess in a way I longed to be rad/ When I was with her it felt wrong to be sad/ Did I tell you an angel finally came and shut my mouth?" he splutters, his voice overcome with a ghostly dolour) whilst the quicksilver twinkles of Shuggie Otis' Strawberry Letter 23 transposed up an octave or three glitter in the backdrop. Instrumental beauty married to a gristly soliloquy, consider this a proverbial crossing of fingers in desperate hope of them spawning something more sometime this era.

Download A Cowboy Overflow Of The Heart via The Avalanches' official site.