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.

Albums of 2020

It’s time for the annual wrap of the best new albums added to your blogger’s collection this year. There’s been a few, but I’ll choose ten for this post, and then take a look at the best of the rest, compilations/reissues, and EPs in a series of separate posts as we enter the new year. This is not so much a “best of” 2020, because I’ve no doubt I’ve missed many of the actual best albums, but more of a personal “most-listened-to” list. As ever, the only prerequisite for inclusion is that I picked up a copy of the album during the year (in any format), which does, admittedly, rule out a good number of decent albums I merely preview-streamed via Spotify and failed to follow through with.

10. The Beths - Jump Rope Gazers

2020 saw Auckland indie-pop nerds The Beths consolidate their reputation as one of the best young bands in the country. A fact confirmed when they picked up three gongs at the annual Aotearoa Music Awards. Sophomore album Jump Rope Gazers wasn’t dramatically different from the band’s debut, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. My full review is here.

9. The Phoenix Foundation - Friend Ship

Five years on from the release of Give Up Your Dreams, which for me was something close to a career high watermark for The Phoenix Foundation (and an album rated number two on this blog’s year-end list for 2015), Wellington’s most eclectic pop collective returned with Friend Ship. And while it didn’t quite scale the lofty heights of GUYD, or earlier work like Horsepower, Pegasus, or Buffalo, it was another great set from a bunch of guys who continue to poke away at boundaries without compromising their core sound. On Friend Ship we got everything from elaborate orchestral stuff - see collaborations with the NZSO - to odd psychedelic moments, proggy flavours, and more snippets of humour than you can shake a funny cigarette at. But mostly we got crafty intelligent pop music dressed in a variety of threads, and the collaborations with Hollie Fullbrook (‘Decision Dollars’, ‘Tranquility’) and Nadia Reid (‘Hounds of Hell’) were outstanding. I also really loved the pomp and swagger of ‘Guru’, the scene-setting album opener. Oddly though, given that it was one of the more high profile album takeaways, and clearly loved elsewhere, I was less taken by the faux-disco of ‘Landline’, which for me veered beyond pastiche and into the realm of just plain cheesy. But then, I’ve always struggled with irony, and it wouldn’t be a proper Phoenix Foundation album if there wasn’t at least one track that left me scratching my head. Not reviewed on the blog.

8. Murmur Tooth - A Fault in This Machine

I was heavily invested in this one during our autumn lockdown period. In my original review (here), I called it the most uneasy listening “easy listening” album you’re likely to hear all year, and nothing happened to change that view. I loved it.

7. Alicia Keys - Alicia

I’m a fan of pure unadulterated pop music, and although Alicia Keys is not usually an artist I’d necessarily gravitate towards, Alicia was an album for the ages. Socially conscious, empowering, and life affirming. My review is here.

6. Nadia Reid - Out of My Province

How could any local not love an album that opens with the line “you took me to Levin”? ... for the uninitiated, Levin is a small soulless market town, about an hour’s drive north of Wellington in New Zealand’s lower North Island, and a million miles removed from any of the romance implied on Nadia Reid’s album opener ‘All of my Love’. And coincidently, a town not a million miles away from where your blogger resides. Anyway, it’s that sense of “us” that first attracted me to Reid’s work as long ago as her Preservation album (of 2017) after overlooking far too much of her early stuff. Out of my Province was probably the biggest “grower” of this year’s bunch. After the first couple of listens I concluded it was all a bit too beige and “generic folky”, but I stuck with it, and as time passed I became far better acquainted with all of its many hidden charms. In fact, although it is only number six on this list, Out of My Province was probably the album I listened to more than any other across the full year. It just wasn’t my ultimate favourite. It helped that it was so workplace (office) compliant and I was able to spend a lot of time with it. Best cuts: ‘Best Thing’, and the silver scroll-nominated ‘Get the Devil Out of Me’. Not reviewed on the blog, which is perhaps just as well, because I feel very differently about it today than I did when I first picked it up.

5. Matt Berninger - Serpentine Prison

Another genuine grower, after curiosity got the better of me. I mean, a Matt Berninger (The National) solo work in collaboration with the great Booker T. Jones, what could possibly go wrong? Not much, evidently. My review is here.

4. The Orb - Abolition of the Royal Familia

An all new intoxicating blend of disco, deep house, ambient electronica, and skanky dub. New Orb, just like old Orb, and if there was a track that summed up the post-apocalyptic nature of 2020 better than album closer ‘Slave Till U Die No Matter What U Buy’, which appropriates Jello Biafra’s ‘Message From Our Sponsor’ spoken-word narrative, then I didn’t hear it. My review is here.

3. The War on Drugs - Live Drugs

Given that I’m going to do a blog year-in-review write-up specifically on compilations and reissues, I was tempted to save this one for that piece. A live album is a compilation by default, right? Um, I guess, but Live Drugs was just too good to ignore and there were a few occasions late in the year when I had this on repeat, so it has to qualify on my most-listened-to list instead. Way more than the sum of its parts, the album is essentially a collection of live extracts from a bunch of different gigs played in support of the band’s two most recent - and most commercially successful - albums, Lost in the Dream (2014) and A Deeper Understanding (2017). Yet it plays like it could all have been recorded at the same gig. The flow, the feels, and sense that this was, or is, a band right at the top of its game. It’s a virtual live “greatest hits”, with eight of the ten tracks coming from those two albums, including seven singles, while there’s one very early TWOD offering, ‘Buenos Aires Beach’, and a fairly choice Warren Zevon cover ‘Accidentally Like A Martyr’. I’ve never been able to put my finger on exactly what appeals most about The War on Drugs; all those classic rock touchstones - big keys, harmonica breaks, and lengthy guitar solos - and all that big Springsteen-esque Americana would usually be enough to have me reaching for the industrial-strength Nurofen, yet somehow it works. There’s some truly epic moments on Live Drugs, and highlights include wonderful versions of ‘Pain’, ‘Red Eyes’, ‘Thinking of a Place’, and ‘Under The Pressure’. No blog review.

2. Antipole - Perspectives II

If I’m going to break unwritten but notional blog rules by including live albums, then I simply have to throw in this remix album, which revisits tunes from Antipole’s 2019 album, Radial Glare. It’s a sister release for the Anglo-Norwegian dark-wavers to Perspectives (which topped this list in 2018), and it was another regular go-to album for me during the autumn lockdown period. My review is here.

1. Fontaines D.C. - A Hero’s Death

I was very slow on the uptake when it came to Fontaines D.C., somehow missing all of the initial hype surrounding the band’s debut album Dogrel (2019), before being seduced into complete and utter submission by the sheer post-punk majesty of this year’s follow-up, A Hero’s Death. I had to chuckle when I read the band’s claim in the NME, upon completion of the album in late 2019, that it “was inspired by the Beach Boys”. Yeah, only if the Beach Boys had been raised on the rain-swept streets of Dublin, consumed Guinness for breakfast, dressed entirely in black, and listened to nothing but the Velvet Underground. This is post-punk 101, 2020-style. A state-of-the-art example of raw, gritty rock n roll, propelled by big basslines, weighty guitars, and a vocalist with a thick booming Irish accent to die for. Which is more than enough, but what really gives A Hero’s Death its next level heft is its clever and artful collection of lyrics. Songs packed full of urgency, insight, irony, and humour. There’s no filler here, and tracks like ‘Televised Mind’, ‘I Don’t Belong’, ‘A Lucid Dream’, and the title track itself, would all be fully legit contenders for any notional eveythingsgonegreen tune of the year.

If there was such a thing. For now, I’ll stick to album reckons. And I’ve got no valid excuse for not giving A Hero’s Death the full review treatment on the blog. Of the ten albums covered here, four are local releases, yet I could just as easily have included a couple more (not least Darren Watson’s Getting Sober release) and I thought it was a pretty good year for homegrown stuff. More on that in my next post.

The flip side to that of course is that it was a terrible year for the local live music scene. With Covid-19, closed borders, lockdowns, and social distancing in effect for large chunks of 2020, quality live gigs were hard to come by. I can’t even really present a decent case for a gig of the year, given I attended so few. I guess it has to be The Beths at Wellington’s San Fran in October, pretty much by default. And I suppose if there was one positive to emerge from a lack of overseas touring acts, it was that local artists got more opportunities to shine as headliners when our nightlife did finally spring back into life mid-year.

Anyway, I’ll have a few more reflections on an extraordinary year over the next few weeks when I take a look at the best of the rest (albums), the best compilations and reissues, and even a post on the remarkable number of great EPs I managed to pick up during the year. In the meantime, be gone 2020. Don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out …

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’.

One Weekend, two great gigs: The Orb Sound System/Moisty Atsushi

I managed to catch Dr Alex Paterson, aka The Orb Sound System, spinning some black magic plastic at Meow (bar) in Wellington last Friday night.

It was another one of those nights for a lot of old faces and friends, and the sold out gig had a pretty mean “in-awe” vibe throughout. Paterson doesn’t make it down to this part of the planet very often, and for a Friday night in the capital, he represents an irresistible draw at a great little venue.

 

 

 

Paterson was generous with the length of time he spent at the decks, and his sets were a mix of high bpm techno, Pink-Floydian ambience, and copious amounts of Lee Scratch Perry-led dub. He continually referenced his own Orb work – across all forms of its existence – and generally kept the crowd transfixed as he mixed and mashed his way through the night.

Support came from local heavyweights like Koa (Rhombus) and Redbird Jnr (did I miss Mu?), only adding to the warmth and sense of occasion I felt for seeing so many longtime-familiar faces out and about. It was a really good night, and another small box ticked on any music bucket list I might (or might not) have made …
 

*

Sometimes though, it’s the gig you least expect that ends up being just as exciting as the long coveted one. That purely spontaneous in-the-moment set you’ve stumbled across by accident.

 

On Saturday night I had one such experience, staggering late doors into Laundry on Cuba, where a Japanese guy, one Moisty Atsushi, a young performer apparently enjoying a solo sojourn from regular crew Atsushi and the Moisties (ahem), was playing to a busy and for the most part fully engaged crowd.   

 

Moisty’s party trick is dressing in a full body “onesie” and playing acoustic rocksteady, ska, and cod reggae. He might not be the most talented guitarist I’ve ever seen, and some of his vocals need (a lot of) work, but I’ve yet to see a more passionately performed live cover of ‘Pressure Drop’ in my puff.

 

As the owner of a very self-deprecating sense of humour and an innocent childlike stage banter, Moisty might just about be the most er, “enthusiastic” artist I’ve ever seen ... constantly cajoling the audience to “singalong and dance” between songs, and proving as infectious a pick-me-up as anyone could possibly find in the post-midnight hour.

 

More generally, Laundry on Cuba, with its good vibes, ramshackle appearance, and regular commitment to ska/roots/dub themes, looks like a very decent (relatively recent) addition to the Wellington live music scene.

                                                                       

 

Enter The Fuzzy Dimension

A friend of mine over at Eleventh Our Creative introduced me this week to a concept called crowd-funding … or in the specific case she was talking about, the crowd-funding of an album that will supposedly be the epic masterwork of ex-Orb guy Kris ‘Thrash’ Weston.

Weston’s project – Enter the Fuzzy Dimension – is dependent on an ambitious bid to raise £60,000 via Kickstarter. In return for your pledge – a range of options – you’ll get an exclusive album that comes in various forms, and the level of your “reward” is largely dependent on the level of your pledge.

Weston is clearly a guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously (see link) but this whole concept raises an interesting discussion on so many levels around how people produce music, how it will be produced and distributed in the future, and even whether or not there is any mileage in Kickstarter projects.

There is also a discussion to be had around artistic integrity, and the whole notion of getting your “art” out to the widest audience possible (something that Weston’s project appears to reject with it exclusivity basis) but perhaps it’s best if I let Weston take you through the idea in his own words:

 

Enter The Fuzzy Dimension

 

And here’s a link to Eleventh Our Creative’s Facebook page:

 

Eleventh Our Creative

 

Album Review: The Orb and Lee Scratch Perry – More Tales From The Orbservatory (2013)

Well, this was something of a surprise – a second outing for The Orb and Lee Scratch Perry. I hadn’t anticipated any follow-up to 2012’s The Orbserver In The Star House, let alone an almost immediate one. More Tales From The Orbservatory gives us a further eleven cuts from the Berlin Orbserver sessions.

 

 Perhaps the biggest surprise of all though is that as an album it all comes together so well. That as a set of tracks not initially considered worthy of release, everything gels together so nicely. The album feels every bit the cohesive and fluent whole it was probably never intended to be, and it stands as testimony to the chemistry and genius of what is now starting to feel like a perfectly natural heavyweight collaboration of talent and ideas.

When I say eleven cuts, what I actually mean is five new songs, five instrumental versions of said songs, plus a charming little interlude (‘Tight Interlude’) which clocks in at just over a minute long. The quality control factor is so high, it’s fair to say that none of these tracks would have been out of place on the debut, and you have to wonder just how many more quality leftovers have been left on the shelf.

Opener ‘Fussball’ is an infectious trip into the simple joys of football, with Perry intoning “pass de ball … kick de ball … win de game” over some deep housey spaced-out electro goodness. Despite its apparent simplicity, its precision and careful use of repetition works well as an attention grabbing album starter.

 

 

‘Africa’ is typical Perry, a so-called “message” track to some extent (“let’s enjoy de eart dat god has give us”), one that hits its mark mainly because of the moments of oddball humour provided in Perry’s stream of consciousness delivery. The glitchy electronic shuffle that passes for a beat provides an almost perfect contrast to Perry’s vocal. It’s a great little track.

 

‘Making Love In Dub’ probably just shades ‘Fussball’ as the album’s highlight. Where Perry dominates the majority of material on More Tales From The Orbservatory, Alex Paterson’s Orb influence is much more obvious and immediate on this one – it feels fuller, a little more complex somehow, and this track definitely works on a more cerebral level than any of the others.

‘No Ice Age’ and ‘Don’t Rush I’ (a Perry mission statement?) round things off – and both tracks are pretty decent – before we get the five instrumental versions spread across the second half of the album. If there is any filler here, if any of this could be regarded as throwaway or leftover material, then I suppose a particularly sticky finger could be directed at this “version” stuff. But even that response feels hard hearted; instrumental versions have long been a staple of dub/dubplate tradition, and I think there’s some value added with their inclusion here.

So I’m loving this album right now. An unheralded, under-the-radar arrival; for all that it is a continuation of the same themes and ideas we got on The Orbserver In The Star House, it’s also a great little album in its own right.

I hadn’t expected any of it, and it somehow feels all the sweeter for that.

Recommended.

Here’s ‘Fussball’:

 

 

 

Albums of 2012 # 3: The Orb & Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry – The Orbserver In The Star House

After all of the advance promotion and social media hype for this album, I have to say I was a little underwhelmed by The Orbserver In The Star House when I finally picked up a copy on CD.

I’d whet my appetite on the continuous drum-roll of preview mixes and pre-release samplers, but somehow it felt lightweight and flimsy when listening to it in its physical form; a throwaway piece of dub/crossover fluff, and the result of little more than a few weeks worth of studio frivolity for Alex Paterson and Lee Perry. A wee bit of fun on the side, before each man returned to whatever else they had on the go.

A few months on, I’ve softened on that first impression. It may well still be all of those things, but having repeatedly taken this out on a series of road trips over the past three months or so, having given it the car audio treatment, having “open road tested” it, if you like, I can unequivocally state that it’s every bit the carefully crafted work of art I initially anticipated it would be.

 

 It isn’t as though the build up wasn’t justified. Each man is a production genius, a past master in the art of what was once considered cutting edge dub, a student and innovator of the form. It seems only natural that the pair should collaborate in the studio sooner or later. That it wasn’t sooner is the only surprise.

With dubstep and its confusing multitude of sub-genres dominating the bass music landscape, there would undoubtedly have been temptation for Paterson and Perry to deviate from what they know. To offer their own unique take on the latest trends. That they didn’t, that they stuck to the tried and trusted forms of what each man does so well, is of some relief, and it offers no little testimony to the collective self belief that runs right through The Orbserver In The Star House. Some of it might be distinctly “old school”, but if that’s the case, it’s a seat of learning that today’s young tykes can only marvel at and learn from.

Perry is once again in imperious form with his stream of consciousness ranting and raving, toasting atop of Paterson’s electro noodlings to create an upbeat and warm summery vibe throughout. None of Perry’s observations are especially profound but they’re frequently offbeat and humorous … more “sly grin” than “laugh out loud”.

 

No, this isn’t an album that you can take too seriously. Yes, there is something distinctly off-the-cuff about it, and yes, it may be lightweight and fluffy in nature, but what I hadn’t realised at the outset was that all of those elements are a big part of its ongoing appeal.

Definitely one for the summer.

Highlights: ‘Ball of Fire’, ‘Soulman’, ‘Hold Me Upsetter’, ‘Golden Clouds’, and one of the most unusual takes on Junior Murvin’s ‘Police And Thieves’ that you’re ever likely to hear.

There’s been a few great remixes of material sourced from the album already, here’s the popular OICHO remix of Golden Clouds:

 

 

 

Album Review: The Orb – Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld (1991)

The upcoming release of the album collaboration between The Orb and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (album preview mix below) is a mouth watering prospect to say the very least.

The fairly recent alliance between The Orb and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour was something of a disappointment for me, and it all felt a little too cumbersome and contrived to my ears. But Perry tends to sprinkle a little stardust on everything he’s involved with, and all early indicators are that The Orb’s Alex Paterson may have met his match with Mr Perry. Whisper it, but we may even have a legitimate dub album of the year contender on our hands.

So in anticipation of what should be a very good second half of 2012 for album releases – I eagerly await the new Adrian Sherwood effort every bit as much – I recently went back and had a listen to The Orb’s 1991 double CD set Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld.

Immersing myself in this monster more than two full decades after its initial release reminded me of just how pioneering Paterson and co were at the time. In fact, the album could easily be mistaken for a much more recent work than it actually is – in true Sci Fi fashion, this sounded truly out of this world back in the early Nineties, and little has changed.



Which, I guess, is the whole point, and something very much recognised in the album’s title. It is other worldly – of this planet obviously, yet very much keen to extend its boundaries well beyond life as we know it (Jim).

As such, we get a whole range of sounds and electronic wonderment to digest – insect and animal noises, birds singing, samples from old TV programmes including the odd NASA documentary, and generally a wide variety of other bits and bobs designed to give the album its extra-terrestrial lost-in-space charm and appeal.

The single ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ (which contains an unauthorised excerpt/intro of Rickie Lee Jones ruminating on the state of the Arizona skies when she was young – something that Jones subsequently objected to) is probably the best known Orb track for non-Orb aficionados, and as wonderful as it undoubtedly is, it is by no means the stand-out on the album, and I’d say the album is best consumed as a whole in one sitting.

At a tick under four and a half minutes ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ – the opening track – is by quite some margin the shortest track to be found on Ultraworld. And as daunting as it might sound, even the 18-minute-plus closer – ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld’ (ahem) – tends to race by without any hint of tedium whatsoever. Of course, that rather depends on what else you’re doing at the time, but I’m sure you’ll take my point.

There’s probably some underlying concept or theme here far too obvious for me to have noticed – other than the inter-planetary aspect touched on – but I prefer not to think too hard about it, this is a great album as a pure listening experience alone and I recommend it to all wannabe space cadets ...

Highlights: ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’, ‘Earth (Gaia)’, ‘Outlands’, and the Reggae-infused ‘Perpetual Dawn’.

Download FACT's preview of the upcoming album:

FACT mix 341 - The Orb & Lee 'Scratch' Perry

And purely for old times sake: The Orb - Little Fluffy Clouds