Album Review: The Orb - Abolition of The Royal Familia - The Guillotine Mixes (2021)

Sometimes a remix project can wind up being a little too clever for its own good. And sometimes an album in its original naked warts-n-all form is best left that way. 

That’s exactly how I feel about The Orb’s 2020 album, Abolition of The Royal Familia. The remix follow-up, the Guillotine Mixes version, which was released earlier this year, adds very little of value, save perhaps for David Harrow’s sublime edit of album opener ‘Daze’. 

I can understand the attraction though. On one hand it was an album screaming out for a reboot, given that the original tended to slip beneath the radar of all but the most dedicated of Orb fans. On the other hand, the album was already close to perfect, and the remix edition just feels like 90-odd minutes of unnecessary lacklustre fluff. I can see the intent. It’s just that the execution doesn’t really match the ambition.

 Harrow adds plenty to ‘Daze’, for sure, converting it from a relatively sunny lightweight disco mix into a brooding, pulsing EDM creeper. Harrow also touches up ‘House of Narcotics’ (simply called ‘Narcotics’ on the Guillotine version). 

The roll call of producers is certainly impressive enough on paper; KLF conspirators Moody Boyz remix ‘Queen of Hearts’, former Orb associate Andy Falconer takes on ‘Slave Til U Die’, Youth reconfigures ‘Shape Shifting Pt.1’, and the much-travelled Kris Needs contributes to ‘Weekend’. I was very surprised that renowned dub merchant Gaudi removed so many of the dub elements from ‘Ital Orb’, thus stripping it of all the special qualities that made it one of the original album’s best tracks. 

I guess my biggest problem with it, is that after the initial promise of Harrow’s opening track, the whole thing just tends to wash over me. Nothing really grabs me. I drift off into a trance-like state, and for all of the spit and polish applied, these remixes veer irreversibly into the realm of ambient background noise. It’s all very pleasant but unlike the original work, there is nothing really challenging or thought provoking about these works. 

It might be that I’m being too picky, but I consumed the 2020 version of Abolition of The Royal Familia during peak-lockdown, early in the year, just as Covid-19 was taking hold of our planet, and it felt like a fairly weighty faux-apocalyptic piece of work. I enjoyed that facet of it. It was an album for and of the moment itself. Something that captured the sense of angst and foreboding we were living through at the time. These Guillotine mixes evoke little more than ambivalence and a resigned nonchalance.

A release for fans and completists only.