The Orb's new-millennium output has varied so wildly, quality-wise, that there's become a sense that a "good" new Orb album is mostly down to whoever has control of the mixing desk this time out. On the one hand, this seems unfair to me, because it always sounds like there's some guilt driving the grudging praise that needs to be alleviated by claiming the new guy in the creative mix is responsible for the much-needed shot-in-the-arm/aesthetic steadying. Not that, say, Thomas Fehlmann is some spring chicken, but you know what I mean.
On the other, I can't deny that the Orb's 21st-century discography is pretty inconsistent, both as a body of work and on an album-by-album basis. With that in mind, I listened to the new Orb album, Baghdad Batteries: Orbsessions Vol. III, completely blind. No idea whose hands/brains were responsible for which track. And it's solid enough: entertaining if rarely revelatory, which probably isn't a reasonable expectation anyway, and dangerously stuck between multiple either/ors-- uptempo and downtempo, retro and innovation. And so the Orb go casting around for proven hits.
For the most part, the album keeps from slumping into the kind of pleasantly familiar bulletin from a long-running act, the kind of late-career album that gets shelved after three months in favor of the older, better stuff. Baghdad's sure hand with the mid-tempo isn't surprising, as the Orb helped invent the rave middle-ground, but unfortunately whimsy and personality can add only so much to Xeroxes. Baghdad recycles recent rave history so frequently that it's got to lean very hard on the Orb's way with beautiful textures to keep listeners from shrugging, sighing, and pulling out the originals.
The first half is muted, drizzly-day ambient-techno-- think "The Blue Room" snipped of the reggae-inflections for the post-Berlin generation; a more streamlined version of Jan Jelinek in throbbing 1970s prog weirdness mode; some not-unpleasant nods to the Artificial Intelligence first-wavers, albeit made with slicker tech. Unfortunately, occasionally, this side of Baghdad does slip into outright, unflattering copycat-ism, swiping from both 90s and 00s continental European classics. Opener "Styrofoam Meltdown" is such a shameless Chain Reaction jack that it even trots out Monolake's precipitation FX, and "Dolly Unit" proves somebody in the Orb camp has been monitoring the Field's rise to clubland acclaim.
Achieving, at their best, a kind of playful conviction, these aren't bad tracks, but they're far too derivative to bother with a third or fourth listen, especially with Hong Kong or From Here We Go Sublime only a click or two away. "Raven's Reprise" is the best of Baghdad's cloning experiments, a truly strange graft of Gas at Wolfgang Voigt's airiest and Terry Riley when he was still nuts for the organ arpeggios. But I can't deny my ears picked up noticeably from track six onward, when things started to get more, well, Orb-esque. The appearance of that old house-meets-dub skank on "Super Soakers" feels downright welcome after the preceding pulseless 20 minutes, as does "Suburban Smog" with electro stabs further agitating some clattering jazz-house percussion.
But the best tracks on Baghdad are the shortest and least obviously indebted, tacked to the end as if they were outro-style afterthoughts. "Pebbles" induces a mini-swoon with just a minute's worth of Lawrence Welk-ian harp runs fed through various fidelity-degrading filters; "Woodlarking" reminds me of the disembodied soul-radio moans of Durutti Column's "Otis" if Vini Reilly had been briefly obsessed with Kraftwerk. These small-scale charmers make me wish for an album's worth of Orb miniatures, perhaps a more fruitful future avenue as Alex Paterson and pals move into their third decade. Everyone loses if we sit around waiting for another "Little Fluffy Clouds", but I can't exactly say who wins if the Orb spend the next 10 years looking for creative juice in other people's records.
