If you like The Avalanches, you’ll love Fantasy by DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ.
The latest sprawling statement from DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ is a four hour refinement of the very specific lane she’s carved out for herself, and it’s her most generous album to date. Swirling, sugary plunderphonics built from diva R&B vocals, glossy house drums, cheesy saxophones and endless glowing layers of 90s pop ephemera.
Fantasy is defined by optimism rather than edge, and longing rather than lust. This is club music drained of confrontational aggression and reimagined as something deeply kind and sentimental on an absurd scale. Forty tracks spread across almost four hours is a test of patience if approached incorrectly, but Fantasy works best as something to dance along to while tidying the house rather than asking for your undivided attention. Some pieces are vast, stacked as densely as My Bloody Valentine’s shoegaze but with walls of pop samples rather than distortion, whilst others strip back to a groove that wouldn’t feel out of place on Daft Punk’s Discovery. NevR 2 L8 stands out as a fully formed pop track, its structure and immediacy cutting cleanly through the collage, whilst Tres Cool, Pt. 1 veers into country sample silliness. Will My Love stacks clichés upon clichés dissolving into feelings of pure devotion. Often the lack of lyrical legibility is key, as words blur into texture. Familiar voices drift through the mix, sometimes covers of well-known pop songs, half-recognisable and half-lost memories you can’t quite place with a deeply nostalgic emotional effect. Over time Sabrina’s samey sound becomes a soothing feature rather than a flaw, lulling you with its consistency and allowing you to sink into the album. It feels good, and lifts the mood quickly and reliably. The technical prowess of assembling something this vast from so many fragments fades into the background, because the focus is on being silly, heartfelt and joyful on a completely unreasonable scale.