I can’t remember the last time I fell in love with an album, but the latest from the Avalanches, We Will Always Love You, did it. What’s funny is how much of it is occupied by genres I don’t even like: cotton-candy pop, overproduced soul, hybrid hip-hop, EDM with all its transparent scripting, and more. But those are the parts; the whole is so much greater. Its range makes you (or made me at least) realize how much they’re exploring those styles because they can, not stamping them out because they have to. Most of all, the album plays with styles’ boundaries — where they begin, where they end, how they meet. Beneath all the impossibly slick production weaving all that experimentation together is a vision of love — yes, really. Not the usual pop fodder, though: it’s earnestly, yearningly spiritual. That’s where the album comes from: the story of Ann Druyan, the creative director on the Interstellar Message Project for the Voyager space probe, falling in love with Carl Sagan, and how her earthly love informed, and was informed by, humanity’s message to space. It’s also where the album is always ending, in the silences of space. It’s SO much fun to listen to.
