Lilacs & Champagne Fantasy World

Nearly a decade after their last album, Lilacs andChampagne picks up right where that record, MidnightFeatures Vol. 2: Made Flesh, left off. With bizarreexcursions into pillowy, sentimental made-for-TV music -and children's choirs incanting the blackest dread-filledmusic the band has conjured to date - Fantasy World isboth transcendent and traumatic.Despite sharing two founding members of Grails(multi-instrumentalists Emil Amos and Alex Hall)Fantasy World only peripherally resembles their coregroup. Lilacs & Champagne have exaggerated theirearly record's implications and accelerated their mercurialrearranging of music history by deftly incorporating liveinstrumentation and samples with equal amounts ofdeference and disregard.Previously existing primarily in a realm adjacent toinstrumental hip-hop (J Dilla, Clams Casino, Madlib),Fantasy World exposes Lilacs & Champagne's deeperlineage as playful tape-collage culture jammers in thevein of legendary sound satirists, Negativland andSevered Heads. It embraces the effect of a child enteringa dollar store: the immediate euphoria felt upondiscovering the seemingly endless aisles piled impossiblyhigh with novelty toys, utensils, party decorations, andtoiletries eventually gives way to the overwhelmingrealization that they're actually just a tourist in a perilousmountain of colorful garbage. From those mountains,Lilacs & Champagne mold monuments to curiosity andconfusion.