The Orb - No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds
I so wanted to like this album. This is the Orb, for goodness sake, progenitors of ambient, electronic music that set out their stall back in 1988 and have been noodling ever since. Doubly exciting was that, after a couple of perfectly serviceable techno-style albums with Thomas Fehlmann, Alex Paterson intended to bring in a whole roster of collaborative talent on board for this one, with a head spinning roll call asked to contribute. The hope was that Paterson, as ringmaster, would marshal all those skills towards producing a vibrant, eclectic sound where, as the title suggests, no sounds are of bounds.
What a pity it hasn’t worked out like that.
There are moments of greatest – loads of moments, actually – with the vocals on the atypical (for the Orb) opening track The End of the End particularly attention grabbing. Even when followed by the challenging gear change of tablas, strings and bass of Wish I Had a Pretty Dog I was still on board. But when followed by dub on Rush Hill Road, and then the minimalism on Isle of Horns, it all started to feel a little fragmented. Jah Wobble’s distinctive bass lines and Roger Eno’s piano on Pillow Fight become things to tick off on my I-Spy book of cameos, rather than a cohesive part of an overall sound, while the received pronunciation of Roney FM’s inserts becomes tiresome very quickly. Wobble and Eno are back for Easy on the Onions, and sound just fine, but not before a poem – you read that right - from Rianna, which is just a bit much, frankly.
Time and again, there are snatches of sound that make you think - make you hope, actually - that things are finally going somewhere, but no sooner has Youth started whacking a double bass, than it is undercut by the ring of mobile phone, or Roney FM is prattling again, or somebody starts strumming on a kitchen sink. There are just too many ideas here, performed by too many people jostling for position, and too little editorial control over what has made it on to the disk. Very little on this album feels entirely thought through or entirely finished off. There’s nothing wrong with variety, but what we have here is a disparate bundle of ideas rammed together with seemingly no attempt to create a thematic unity. The abiding feeling, having listened to the whole thing, was to respectfully suggest Patterson now takes away all those rough cut demos and make a proper album from them. Its only in the closing track, the fifteen minute Soul Planet, do we see everyone start to calm down, and Paterson finally offering up the space to develop interesting musical ideas, and that is simply too little, too late.
In an age when downloading tracks is making the album a dying art, we look to acts like the Orb to produce something that can sustain our attention for more than five minutes. On the evidence of this album, it’s an art that Alex Paterson seems to have forsaken.
