As AllMusic's Tim Sendra aptly notes, Australian plunderphonics experts The Avalanches "are masters at creating new melodies out of old records, fresh feelings out of lost snippets of sound". In the case of "Subways", the third single for their long-awaited (16 years, to be exact) sophomore album Wildflowers (2016), the primary sources are Chandra’s “Subways” (1980) and Graham Bonnet’s version of The Bee Gees’ late-period classic “Warm Ride" (1978).
Chandra Oppenheim was only 12 when she fronted the post-punk, outsider disco group CHANDRA via her famous father, Dennis Oppenheim. There's a timeless quality within the precociousness of her lyrics and her youthful vocal delivery, and The Avalanches have certainly tapped into that aspect to make an entire song from the opening verse of her original track:
'You walk on the subway, subwayYou walk on the subway (it moves around)You walk on the subway, it moves aroundSo you go to see what you found(Subway, subway, it moves around)'
Lyrics: Genius
The result is a post-punk vibe dressed up in a nostalgic 70s disco packaging, a blissful summer jam with the slightest hint of menace: 'You hear someone scream, so you go to see what you found'. It certainly fits into Mark Richardson's description of The Avalanches' classic template: "AM Gold pop with its sweet strings bleeds into delicate disco with beats inspired by early hip-hop unpinning the whole, imbuing it with a kind of bookish innocence common to the world of indie pop". The end-product is a fun roller-coaster ride down memory lane, where younger listeners like me (who were born after the 70s) get a better chance at imagining the possibilities that big afros and bell bottoms offered at the time. And "Subways" is all about the promise of possibility - the random people you might meet along the way, the distant places that were now easily accessible, lives that couldn't be lived otherwise.
