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.

Album Review: The Orb - Abolition of the Royal Familia (2020)

The Orb keep on keeping on. Keep on delivering. Perhaps more than any other 90s electronic dance music pioneer. Not always without some level of sonic compromise, but always ensuring the quality control filter remains sufficiently high.

Collaborators and co-conspirators, both within and outside of the project’s inner sanctum, have come and gone, but key man Alex Paterson has been one constant throughout the project’s 30-year-plus evolution. 

Paterson’s capacity for fruitful collaboration is again to the fore on this latest Orb release, and along with current primary partner in crime, Michael Rendall, Abolition of the Royal Familia features heavyweight contributions from electronic scene veterans like Steve Hillage, Roger Eno (Brian’s bro), Youth, David Harrow, Gaudi, and most notably on ‘Daze’, vocalist Andy Caine. 

The music itself is an expansive journey into disco, deep house, Floydian ambience, dub, and sampling. There’s politics, humour, plus hybrid themes of a post-apocalyptic nature, including on-point use of Jello Biafra’s spoken word ‘Message From Our Sponsor’ on the particularly poignant closer, ‘Slave Till U Die No Matter What U Buy’. 

All tracks have relatively long-winded “remix” tags in their respective titles, presumably to help differentiate them, eventually, from any yet-to-be-released alternative mixes that may or may not be destined to follow. But they’re all brand new tracks, and simply calling each “the original mix” is hardly very Orb-like is it? 

More generally, Abolition of the Royal Familia captures the essence of Paterson’s long-held commitment to a cross pollination of dance music styles, and it’s a no-skip listen from start to finish. Pretty much everything you’d expect from a new Orb album in 2020. 

Aside from the aforementioned tracks, both of which are doozies, my own favourites here are the dubbier numbers, ‘Say Cheese’, and the “too blessed to be stressed” mix of ‘Ital Orb’.