#60

#60. The Avalanches (feat Danny Brown & MF DOOM) - Frankie Sinatra (#28, 2016)

7th of 2016

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I still may not have gotten through watching all of The Wire, but I got to the end of Season 2, which means that I'm well primed to make one groan-inducing pun. One with an incredibly narrow Venn diagram of appreciation, that I've already found myself saying over and over again. Ah Frankie Sobotka, ah, Frank Sobotka. Frankie, me boy, don't know, how they got those girls all in the container. Just crazy how they named a whole song after him.

The unexpected return of The Avalanches might just be one of the biggest events in Australian music in the 2010s. Unexpected might be the wrong word, because it had been frequently speculated, but it's still something that you find yourself having second thoughts, and doubts about. I've said it before, but 15 years is such a long time. The first time The Avalanches were in the chart, they were sharing space with Savage Garden and The Superjesus. When they returned, it was Flume & Desiigner. People streamed music now, which had the immediate effect of drastically aging a lot of would-be comebacks from getting their moment in the sun. The age demographic that was controlling the narrative got a whole lot younger, and young enough to have no idea who The Avalanches were or why they should even care.

Nonetheless, this was something that defied the uphill battle. It's why I can report that after all those years, The Avalanches managed to get their first and only top 50 hit with the song "Frankie Sinatra", a song that immediately left the chart and never truly crossed over, but held enough intrigue to make its mark in the moment. Shawn Mendes released one of his biggest ever hits, "Treat You Better" that week, and The Avalanches managed to outpace it. After all the build-up, we just had to know what it was like. What we ended up with is something that's hard to fully unpack, because it feels like much of the song's identity comes down to its curious guest list, two rappers that I have a lot of time for.

Danny Brown feels like part of triple j folklore. It's not even really for a good reason, just that back in 2013, triple j chose his album "Old" as a feature album. This was an extremely polarising choice for many who found his idiosyncratic delivery to be a bridge too far. His high-pitched rapping voice becoming a calling-card as well as his habits for fast delivery and strange punchlines. It can sound like a joke, and sometimes it is, but when he's on his game, he's hard to match.

2016 was a pretty pivotal moment for him I think, because very soon after "Frankie Sinatra", he released "When It Rain", the lead single to his 3rd album "Atrocity Exhibition". That album is one of my favourite albums ever. It just lets him be completely in his element and sounds purely chaotic. I feel like "Ain't It Funny" should have managed to be some sort of hit by now. Over time, Danny Brown has just continued to prove himself as one of the most irreplaceable guys in rap because of just how unique he is. I've often felt like some of it comes from him being a relative elder stateman in rap music. There are many older rappers than him, but he didn't really break through until he was well into his 30s, so a lot of the reckless abandon just comes from a different place.

In all fairness, this is also something that can be said about MF DOOM, who was at around a similar age when he first started getting more popular. It feels a little different though because MF DOOM's music is more abstract and personal only in the sense that he takes on a fictional larger-than-life persona, but is otherwise not known for showing much of himself. He's so secretive that he died on Halloween back in 2020 and no one found out about it until Christmas (he did it on Halloween, the true Operation: "doomsday"). He's a villain, he wears a mask. He might just be some British guy who's really into comic books, but he still ends up being one of the all-time greatest MCs.

DOOM was an incredibly prolific performer with an absolute monster of a discography full of mixtapes, collaborations and side-branching personas where he constantly records under different names depending on who he's working with. It's always felt like an immense undertaking so my knowledge of his discography is pretty scattered. Definitely count me in as one of those people who is obsessed with "Madvillainy" though, his collaboration with Madlib. It's such a strange sell because it's not really a typical album as you might know it. Almost all of the songs are about 2 minutes long and rarely feel like 'singles', but just the whole package is so alluring. DOOM has an incredible gift in his flow where his complex rhymes schemes just seem to bounce off, combined with a good choice of ear-catching words and his distinct deep voice, I can't fault him. 

It's funny to look back at this collaboration with the way it positions The Avalanches in the year 2016. You've got the relative veteran in MF DOOM, as well as the relative newcomer Danny Brown, and they're joined together by a bunch of guys who haven't released much of anything since the year 2000 and have the potential to be incredibly out of touch. Maybe they still are, but in exactly the same way I am, so I've fallen for it. The main thing I want to highlight is that when they premiered "Frankie Sinatra" on the radio, they only prefaced it by saying Danny Brown was on it, with an additional guest star. This is something that has prime potential for clickbait trappings, the less interesting moment tucked away because it's not a headline. Instead, it turns the song's first listen into a surprise odyssey, where you're just shocked to hear an incredibly recognisable MF DOOM showing up. It's not his greatest verse or anything, but I do find it very memorable for the moment in the middle of the verse where he suggests that he's punching Rocky in the face with a classic punching sound effect. His verse is followed up with a sampling of "The Sound of Music", just another one of their strange budget flexes.

"Frankie Sinatra" is also an unusual song because the single version is actually longer than the album version, but not just in a manner of chopping things off. It's re-arranged just a little bit, the album version chops off the first 20 seconds, and also much of the extended outro. On paper, you'd think the single version's intro makes more sense on the album, but what you'll find is that "Because I'm Me" (#493) comes before it and actually inherits those 20 seconds (I feel like I didn't highlight last time but the last minute or so of "Because I'm Me" is incredibly beautiful). triple j actually played the single version of "Frankie Sinatra" when it made the Hottest 100 so there was potential for them to have played that same segment twice, but they cut off "Because I'm Me" right when it got there. Missed potential to confuse a lot of people by having this song appear to arrive super early.