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Buy a CD UK - Since I Left You
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List Price: £10.99
Our Price: £6.69
Your Save: £ ( % )
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: XL
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0634904013820
Format: Enhanced
Label: XL
Manufacturer: XL
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: XL
Release Date: 2001-04-16
Studio: XL
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: What's all the fuss?
Comment: I got this on it's release on the strength of the singles "Since I Left You" and "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 and little more. It sounds like the musical equivalent of enough monkeys and a typewriter will produce a Shakespeare, enough samples and DJs will eventually 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 actually 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 and 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Since I left you
Comment: The Avalanches are a DJ's dream come true -- six Aussies who took hundreds of sound snatches, and 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, and 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" and 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," and the interference-laden Rastafarian rock "Flight Tonight."
But with all the dance tracks, the Avalanches have their softer side: the delicately upbeat "Two Hearts in 3/4 Time," the swaying "Electricity," the brief and staticky "Pablo's Cruise," and the gauzy, multilayered "Etoh." It rounds off with the majestically languid "Extra Kings," which has a long sweep of distortion and chaos in the middle.
It's almost too easy to dance to the Avalanches. They take almost a thousand mismatched sounds and manage to cobble them into some really brilliant music. What's especially brilliant is the way these patchwork dance tracks manage to find solid, simple grooves, and 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 overall sound; instead, they enhance it. Scattered in amongst the melody is the sound of video games, horses, discos, golf instructions, flutes, pianos, and seagulls -- it adds a strangely whimsical sound to the dance music.
The vocals tend to be samples repeated over and 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 hysterically 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, and turns them into a mosaic. Fun, playful, fast and hypnotically bizarre, this is a must have for fans of quirky music.
Customer Rating:
Summary: wow
Comment: Found this cd one night after seeing the video for 'since I left you' at 4am on MTV. Saw the recomendations here and thought, what the heck, lets buy it. And from first play it's an amazing dance record that can be played over and over again with out getting boring. Ok, a few tracks could be better, but at the most, 2. The rest just all 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 and tell others about this hidden masterpiece.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wish the would make another!!
Comment: 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...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Summertime or anytime album
Comment: Wonderfully original. The Avalanches used over 800 samples on this album - yet the whole thing feels so perfectly balanced. Blissful, retro funk and beats.
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Editorial Reviews:
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The Avalanches are a much-feted six-man crew of sample-addicts from down-under, whose debut album Since I Left You is a bargain-bin vinyl throwback to the Daisy Age. Their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach is exemplified by their debut single, "Since I Left You", which opens the record with its wistful disco-samba shuffle and a scintillating sliced-and-diced soul vocal. The album is constructed like a mix tape and calculated to tweak the dance floor. Snatches of familiar rhythms bubble up throughout, giving the record a comfortable lived-in feel, but also betraying the fact that the group haven't dug very far through the crates to source their raw material. Vast chunks of records by Madonna, Art of Noise, Kid Creole And The Coconuts and Parisian hip-hoppers Saian Supa Crew are easily identifiable. There's little doubt that this kind of sample re-construction has become standard fare for retrogressive adolescents with a mania for collecting records and precious little musical flair. The Avalanches get full marks for their seamless mixing skills, but otherwise it all feels way too neat and tidy, bristling with its own inventiveness when it should strive for something that transcends its influences. For every innovator like DJ Shadow and Dan the Automator, there will be an avalanche of imitators. --Chris Campion
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