AVALANCHE PARTY

In the organizer's words:

During the pandemic, locked down in the Limbo of a live-in rehearsal room on an industrial estate in Darlington in which no band was allowed to rehearse, Avalanche Party frontman Jordan Bell wrote DER TRAUM ÜBER ALLES on his left arm in permanent marker every day: ‘The dream above all else.’ Taking inspiration from David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish – the filmmaker’s book of bite-sized ruminations on imagination, meditation and the power of the dream – Bell’s daily tattoo served as a galvanizing slogan, a reaffirmation of his dedication to live a defiantly creative life, however precariously, seemingly stuck in the arse-end of nowhere. Newly signed to AMK, the alternative music imprint of Kartel Music Group, Avalanche Party’s second album Der Traum Über Alles is set for release in November 2024. If you were to sit the LP down on the psychoanalyst’s couch, its themes of bloodlust, subversion and incineration might suggest a heavy payload of pent-up aggression being detonated. The record’s first half in particular feels like a sonic exorcism: a 21st century occult primal scream that shifts from the frenzied New Wave of ‘Nureyev Said it Best’ and ‘Shake the Slack’ to the exhilarating war-drum deliverance of ‘Serious Dance Music’ and ‘Collateral Damage’. Der Traum Über Alles sledgehammers and it seduces: the elegant ‘Ecstasy’ has a tenderness that gradually veers into instability, as if Bell is committing himself to a lover at the end of days, while closer ‘Noise Between Us’ has all the fatalistic grandeur of Berlin-era Bowie as the band tempts us towards the void: ‘Into the edge, my love/Falling overboard.’ Formed in 2016, Avalanche Party – Jordan Bell (vocals/guitar), Joe Bell (bass/vocals), Jared Thorpe (guitar/sax/vocals), Glen Adkins (keys) and Kane Waterfield (drums) – have stated ‘nobody comes from where we come from.’ Hailing from different corners of North Yorkshire, the band was put together by the brothers Bell, who were brought up on a farm on the sprawling moors, home-schooled by their parents and initiated into the counterculture by their father Pete, who in the late 1960s was resident bassist at Beckenham Arts Lab, playing alongside Bowie among other South East London radicals. Blitzing together their distinctive styles (Waterfield’s hard-hitting, bouncing-bomb drumming; Thorpe’s expressive avant-rock pyrotechnics; Joe Bell’s athletic basslines; Adkins’ intoxicating synth), Avalanche Party create a noise that blends and twists their individual influences into shapes that defy any neat label. Intended as a deviation from the ‘loud, thrashy’ live performances that first got them noticed, the band’s 2019 debut LP 24 Carat Diamond Trephine spurts forth a spectrum of styles, leaping from frenetic garage-psych to sedate surrealistic Americana to staccato uplifting indie rock over the course of its thirty-nine minutes. Der Traum Über Alles, in contrast, is a more considered, full-formed beast, its dark underbelly undoubtedly a result of it being conceived during and after the caged-animal isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, on that industrial estate in Darlington and down in the basement studio they built in Middlesbrough once restrictions were eased. Decorated with Warholian tinfoil wallpaper, the studio served as a year-long nerve centre for the band while Thorpe and the brothers Bell pieced together their ideas, before a freak flood in September 2022 forced them to flee. There is a directness and immediacy to the songs on Der Traum Über Alles, many of which originated on an ultra-simplified three-string guitar Jordan built prior to the band writing the LP. Adapting Lou Reed’s ostrich tuning (each string tuned to the same note, octaves apart), Bell challenged himself to relearn the instrument, its strict limitations inspiring rather than inhibiting a stream of new ideas. The guitar’s supercharged drone allows space for the other instruments to creep and claw their way to the fore, like Joe’s bass on ‘Collateral Damage’ steering us melodically through the industrial onslaught, or Adkins’ eerie piano lines turning ‘Chainz’ into an apocalyptic cabaret lament. For all its urgency, the making of the LP required near-superhuman patience from the band. Recorded in November 2022 with Dave Catching (Queens of the Stone Age/Eagles of Death Metal) at Rancho de la Luna – his beautifully eccentric home studio on the edge of Joshua Tree National Park, California – Avalanche Party were set to be there two years before, but had to wait for the US border to reopen after repeated lockdowns Stateside. Swapping subterranean Teesside for this magical, hazardous desert landscape populated with rattlesnakes, scorpions and cholla cacti, the band recorded Der Traum Über Alles in just ten days with Catching as their generous free-spirited pilot, his intimate knowledge of his idiosyncratic gear and Thanksgiving cooking sustaining the rapid-fire sessions. Shortly before recording, the band had test-driven the tracks on a twelve-nation European tour supporting …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, ensuring they could be put to tape with laser-guided directness, and Catching’s laidback mastery of his equipment likewise ensured they felt like spontaneous eruptions after so many months of state-enforced suspended animation. In dream analysis, to dream of an avalanche is to perhaps feel overwhelmed by a deluge of perceived anxieties, while to dream of a party might suggest a desire for more social interaction or repulsion in the face of too much unwanted attention. Like the hallucinated Rudolf Nureyev ‘dancing all night long through the streets’ in ‘Nureyev Said it Best’, Avalanche Party offer the best possible solution to the strains, strife and superficiality of our times: to set yourself free with unbridled, rampant creativity. Witnessing the band live is like being present at an electrified possession ritual and, with Der Traum Über Alles, they have produced a propulsive soundtrack to their darkest reveries; an incendiary alternative to the mundanity and meaninglessness of modern life and its mass-manufactured culture; a riotous call to arms, urging you to cling to your dreams above all else. - Der Traum-über alles-Tour 2025

Price information:

24,00 € zzgl. Gebühren