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Blue Album
Home > Complete List of "o" Artists > Orbital > Item 36
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Blue Album
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by Orbital
Sales Rank: 352333
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$7.90
At Amazon
on 9-27-2008.
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1. Transient
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2. Pants
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3. Tunnel Vision
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4. Lost
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5. You Lot
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6. Bath Time
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7. Acid Pants
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8. Easy Serv
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9. One Perfect Sunrise
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The UK dance act's seventh & final album. The 'Blue Album' features collaborations with Sparks & Lisa Gerrard (Dead Can Dance). Nine tracks. HTI Records. 2004.
Sure, Orbital always had the occasional dissonant numbers, but at their best, they made better melodies than just about any other techno band. Even when they made slow, melancholy tracks, the keyboards were always so clean and melodic as to lift one's spirits anyway, and when they were applied to loud, fast dance anthems with tough beats, like "Lush 3-1," the result was sheer Ecstasy. So it's kind of a surprise that the Blue Album really doesn't have much in the way of those bright-eyed, bushy-tailed melodies at all. On the contrary, the feel of the album is very ambiguous; even a pleasant diversion like "Bath Time" sounds a bit subdued, a bit uncertain. This is largely due to Orbital's use of the claustrophobic bass sound of early techno. Some of the chirping effects in "Transient" could have come from a decade-old Black Dog Productions track, and "Lost" has a cold, chiming melody that looks back to Autechre's first two albums. As if to accentuate Orbital's newly dark aesthetic, "You Lot" steals the main rhythm from Underworld's timeless track "Dirty." The skittish synthesizer patterns in the same track are also very similar to those in Underworld's "Dark Hard." But where Underworld's night-time city was alternately menacing and sad, Orbital's is luminous and sterile, deliberately artificial like the highways and tunnels leading away from a major international airport. ("Pants" is a great track to listen to while driving in just such a setting.) The heavily distorted vocal samples at the end of "You Lot" call to mind another techno landmark, Juan Atkins' "Night Drive Through Babylon." To this classicist style, which has been dormant for so long (thanks to "jungle") that it actually sounds quite fresh on this album, Orbital add their recent interest in film music. The melody in "Easy Serv" sounds like it was stolen from some melancholy seventies-era romantic film; it would be perfect for watching the handsome protagonist walk past some bystanders down a rainy autumn street with a thoughtful look on his face. "Transient" has a violin melody at the end that would fit the opening credits of a pretty good noir film. Unfortunately, Orbital also have a sense of humour, and on top of that they want to take one last stab at dance music, so we get "Acid Pants," which revolves around the repetition of an unbelievably obnoxious sample as drum machines whack away in the background. I doubt many people will dance to it. To make up for that, however, they also reprise a good Orbital tradition: vague social commentary in the form of foreboding samples. As longtime Orbital fans will recall, they did this back when they were protesting against the anti-rave Criminal Justice Bill of 1994 by inserting ominous film samples about totalitarianism into "Forever," the gorgeous opening track of their album Snivilisation. This time around, "You Lot" features a bloke expressing the view that mankind is insufficiently aware of the possible negative consequences of altering DNA and cultivating destructive bacteria. Ah, Orbital, always looking out for us. "One Perfect Sunrise," the last track, seems like a pretty obvious rewrite of Orbital's well-known "Halcyon + On + On." Unfortunately, it doesn't have any hooks half as good as the guitar echo and the main rhythm of the 1992 hit, so the instrumental build-up isn't nearly as effective. However, it does have guest vocalist Lisa Gerrard (known for her work in Dead Can Dance, and more recently, for composing the score to the film Whale Rider), which goes very far indeed. As a singer, Gerrard is miles above Kirsty Hawkshaw, who did the airy cooing in "Halcyon + On + On," and entirely thanks to her, "One Perfect Sunrise" goes straight from a pointless rehash of Orbital's former glory to a song that nearly equals it. I find myself wondering: who's going to be listening to this album five or ten years down the line? Orbital announced the end of their career before releasing it; they presented it as a deliberate swan song, a sort of album-length thank-you note to their fans. That deliberately retrospective approach already implies that the album isn't an effort to blaze exciting new trails in electronica (even though, in reality, it significantly departs from Orbital's established style, in feel if not in technique). It's as if Orbital themselves acknowledged that their time was past, and gave up in advance on any possibility of breaking new ground, which means that it's unlikely that any of the tracks on the album are going to become smash hits at Da Club. That's a shame, because it really is a pretty good album, and deserves a wide audience. Sure, it hasn't got the same highs as Orbital 2, but it's much more consistently good, and it makes a far better end to Orbital's career than The Altogether. Sorry to see you go, fellows.
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Blue Album
Available from Amazon
Price: $7.90
Updated on 9-27-2008.
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