Lilacs & Champagne, “Fantasy World”

By

Casey Jarman

·
July 17, 2024

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Lilacs & Champagne’s Fantasy World opens like a creaky coffin. The first identifiable sound on opener “Ill Gotten Gains” is a ghastly voice; maybe moaning, perhaps trying to sing. A gaggle of laughs or screams follow, lovingly scavenged sonic ghosts pouring out into a dead moon night of crackling vinyl samples and haunted juxtapositions. Some slow-motion singers cue themselves up, scrobbling backward and lurching ahead. With the mood set—spooky, dusty, playfully psychedelic, and tinged with an inscrutable ennui—the beat drops.

One kind of listener, at this juncture, is already delighting in their attempts to identify all of the flotsam: is this bassline sampled or performed? Is that man saying “Where’s your pop?” or “Where’d you park?” A different kind of fan is just now sinking comfortably into the moody not-knowing. Emil Amos and Alex Hall, the gravediggers behind Lilacs & Champagne’s latest, seem satisfied with either response. They’ve built a career on subverting expectations with their more intense and contemplative project, the shape-shifting band Grails. Lilacs & Champagne is where the fun stuff goes: the esoteric crate-digging discoveries, the grindhouse mood pieces, the inside jokes.

Because Lilacs often feels like an intimate correspondence between two old friends, it’s hard to project a tidy home on this music. Amos and Hall are clearly inspired by hip-hop production gods like Madlib and J Dilla—and one hears DJ Shadow in their penchant for world-building—but they’re ultimately genre outcasts composing imaginary film scores, embellishing tracks with their own instrumentation as they see fit. The project hasn’t really reinvented itself since debuting in 2012, but Amos and Hall have grown more comfortable with their project’s inherent nuance. There’s room for everything: the funky quiet-storm-smooth-jazz of “No More Sherry”; the alternately cult-y and ambient “Leprotic Phantasies” (which might be momentarily mistaken for an Aphex Twin B-side); and the Lynchian “Melissa,” with its plucked strings and tidy breakbeat, all tender and dreamlike.

The outlandish parts feel just as intimate as the subtle ones. Album centerpiece “Evil Has No Boundaries” samples the theatrically cryptic live rant of a famed metal frontman while deconstructed guitar riffs and breakbeats build to a crescendo worthy of Ennio Morricone. “Fantasy Land” is built around a scratchy and memorable riff and a boom-bap beat, but it’s so pensive and noir that you half expect a whiskey-drunk Philip Marlowe to begin narration.

Lilacs and Champagne’s deep commitment to discovery and a vague sense of menace tie these enigmatic tracks together. This is also the source of some cognitive dissonance: When the vibe is this rich, it’s almost a shame that the music is so readily accessible. In a more just universe, Fantasy World would be something one discovered in a musky old attic or haggled away from a dead-eyed traveling salesman. Water-damaged Betamax would be a more appropriate medium than MP3 or vinyl. Alas, there’s ultimately enough mystery, and even fun, in these songs themselves to substitute for a super sick origin story.