Named
after London's ring road, where those rave parties happened back in
the day, Orbital were part of a triumvirate of Nineties acts rooted
in dance music. Along with Leftfield and the Chemical Brothers, they
made music you could listen to as easily as dance, and won fans in
the world outside the party scene. (One of which was me.) Yet it
seemed vital the way each managed to stay rooted in dance while
bringing in things from outside. (I mean, I like the Prodigy as much
as the next man, but they essentially swapped being a dance act for
being a rock band.)
However,
Orbital seemed unique even in that triumvirate. Both Leftield and the
Chemical Brothers moved further into rock modes and song structures,
often working with guest vocalists like speed dating to stay fresh.
Orbital had precisely one guest vocalist, Alison Goldfrapp, who would
more commonly chant or babble nonsense words than sing.
And
instead of song structures tracks would stretch into phases and
movements. Mark Riley once remarked that Television were like a
string quartet who just happened to use rock instruments. Bass and
drums wouldn't just provide a backdrop for some guitar fretboard
stretching, every instrument would contribute to a string of
overlapping, interlocking lines. Similarly, Orbital were like a
string quartet with electronic instruments. Even though there was
only two of them. More than anyone else, they were dance music's
grown-up children.
When
popular music tries to take on a greater sophistication, it often
ends up falling between stools. Those longer numbers aren't
really as intricate as a string quartet, while
they're no longer as appealing to dance to. Orbital's greatest
triumph may lie in that never happening to them, in having enough
reach to grasp at both ends. In about every sense, they seemed to
know which button to press. From the peeling bells of their first
release, 'Chime', they seemed able to conjure up
sounds which hit you at quite a primal level. And, as fitted their
raving roots, the feeling they went for was euphoria. A track like
'Way Out' has the sense of Christmas carols,
without the cheesiness, while 'The Girl With The Sun In Her
Hair' uses a human heartbeat for it's bass line. Those who
claim electronic music to be merely cold and cerebral have simply
never listened to Orbital.
Instead
of vocalists they featured samples, often lengthy and from unusual
sources. 'Forever', for example, featured the
closing speech from Lindsey Anderson's 'Britannia
Hospital'. These often suggested at social and
environmental issues, but were oblique more than didactic. They
worked like the blurry photos in the booklet to 'The Middle
of Nowhere'. The photos themselves were often simple
snapshots, but the combination of the blurry filters and the emphasis
thrown on them transformed them - into something allusive and
mysterious.
Yet
the Nineties were now some time ago, and (as doesn't occur to me
until afterwards) I haven't heard a single Orbital release since that
far-flung decade. Will their edge still be cutting? Unusually for the
dance genre they have a reputation for wanting to play
live, rather than just employ backing tapes and projections, and
certainly much of the stuff I know gets reworked and rearranged here.
Yet, in what seems significant, there's a noticeable move away from
off-the-wall samples into more regular dancey vocals. They're as good
as ever at inducing audience frenzy. But it lacks something of the
lucid frenzy of old, the audacious invention.
What
they were about, if reduced to a soundbite, was dance plus. It's like
that plus has been eroded over time. They're still good. They're
still very, very good. If this was all you knew of them, you'd
probably have raved about this gig. (In about every sense.) But I'm
not sure they're still great.
Interestingly,
when I saw the recent Chemical Brothers concert film 'Don't
Think' I thought something similar. (Leftfield haven't had
a release since the Nineties, so we can't triangulate the crossfire.)
Somewhere along the way, before most of us were born, popular music
got given the task of reflecting and epitomising it's era. This style
of dance-plus managed to do that for the Nineties superbly. But
perhaps then's gain is now's loss, and what we are left with is the
style rather than the substance.
In
the unlikely event you haven't heard anything by them before, here'ssome YouTube vids they selected themselves. While
this is the classic 'Chime'
from Brighton...
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