In Rotation: Australia’s Pnau forges dance gems from ‘70s sounds

Fans of the Australian group Avalanches are still waiting for a follow-up to 2000’s “Since I Left You,” a landmark album on which the sampling masters created startling new music from thousands of tiny song snippets. Now, another Australian act appears determined to fill the gap.

The pop-wise knob-twirlers of Pnau -- including Nick Littlemore, who also plays in Empire of the Sun -- rummage through Elton John’s early-’70s catalog on “Good Morning to the Night,” grafting together bite-sized bits of his tunes: a guitar lick from “Crazy Water,” or the vocal line from “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” that provides the record’s title.

The result, which recently earned John his first No. 1 album in the U.K. since 1990, conjures the same enchanting mixture of familiarity and originality as “Since I Left You”; it summons a heady sense of nostalgia for the way things almost were.

Yet Littlemore and partner Peter Mayes employ so much tasty tech-head detail that they never seem trapped in yesterday -- or even in John’s notion of what his music should be or do. In “Phoenix,” for instance, they surround words about the nature of reality (from the rootsy “Grey Seal”) with a whooshing, proudly synthetic disco groove. For Pnau, “Your Song” is their song.

Pnau
“Good Morning to the Night”
(Casablanca)

ALSO:

Review: HARD Summer Music Festival 2012

With ‘Blunderbuss,’ Jack White aims for new beginning

Lollapalooza evacuated, shut down for hours due to severe storms