Nearly a decade after their last album, Lilacs and Champagne picks up right where that record, Midnight Features Vol. 2: Made Flesh, left off. With bizarre excursions into pillowy, sentimental made-for-TV music – and children's choirs incanting the blackest dread-filled music the band has conjured to date – Fantasy World is both transcendent and traumatic.
Despite sharing two founding members of Grails (multi-instrumentalists Emil Amos and Alex Hall) Fantasy World only peripherally resembles their core group. Its most somber tracks, such as Dr. Why and Last Frontier, approach the morbid loneliness of the beloved Grails series, Black Tar Prophecies. But Lilacs & Champagne have exaggerated their early record's implications and accelerated their mercurial rearranging of music history by deftly incorporating live instrumentation and samples with equal amounts of deference and disregard.
Previously existing primarily in a realm adjacent to instrumental hip-hop (J Dilla, Clams Casino, Madlib), Fantasy World exposes Lilacs & Champagne’s deeper lineage as playful tape-collage culture jammers in the vein of legendary sound satirists, Negativland and Severed Heads. It embraces the effect of a child entering a dollar store: the immediate euphoria felt upon discovering the seemingly endless aisles piled impossibly high with novelty toys, utensils, party decorations, and toiletries eventually gives way to the overwhelming realization that they’re actually just a tourist in a perilous mountain of colorful garbage. From those mountains, Lilacs & Champagne mold monuments to curiosity and confusion.
Tracklist:
1. Ill Gotten Gains
2. Rude Dream
3. Fantasy Land
4. Melissa
5. Betraying Yourself
6. Ready Rubbed Blue
7. Evil Has No Boundaries
8. No More Sherry
9. Gentle Man
10. Leprotic Phantasies
11. 144 York Way
12. Last Frontier
13. Dr. Why
14. Ordinary Man
Please note that Fantasy World (Vinyl LP) is currently not in store but is an imported title from an overseas supplier.
Most of the time it takes around 2-3 weeks for the item to arrive here and be sent out but it can take longer if there are any delays.