There are undoubtedly a slew of people that will be enamored with this new Adrian Orange record. Maybe they're already taken with his sizable discography-- the 21-year-old (male, despite this album's title) has channeled his muse into seven albums and a handful of EPs since 2001. Maybe they're just coming around to Orange's particular charms as a result of this record. They will marvel at the musicianship that his band exhibits, which here includes K Records head honcho Calvin Johnson and Mr. Microphones Phil Elvrum. They will forgive Orange for his not-ready-for-any-time-- or, if you prefer, "inspired"-- vocal stylings, perhaps directing naysayers to the storied and successful careers of singers such as Conor Oberst, Pere Ubu's Dave Thomas, and Biz Markie.
Given enough rope, fans might even suggest that the frisson created between Orange's vocal wanderlust and his backing band's comparatively overwhelming competence is an intentional juxtaposition undertaken to put the listener's focus square on the substance of Orange's flower-powered lyrical bent. Hopefully, they'll ignore the mini-manifesto offered by K Records in the band's biography, because I'm not sure potential converts will be won over by the notion of this thing transmogrifying into a "leaderless, formless, psychedelic, general liberation project." God bless if this prospect inspires you to turn on and tune in, but it gets me thinking of archival footage I saw in a rock documentary of Big Brother & the Holding Company (sans Janis) jamming along to a pan of sizzling bacon, and those are the sort of thoughts that have me preemptively reaching for the stop button. Actually listening to this mess only corroborates my initial hunch.
For my money, it's the band that makes Adrian Orange & Her Band as intermittently tolerable as it is. Whoever is making like a palsy-afflicted Ray Manzarek on the organ during "Then We Play", though, should be sent out for cigarettes whenever the group threatens to play out. I imagine most folks would rather listen to actual Afrobeat or reggae records if they want to scratch that particular itch, but if you have an overwhelming need to hear a bunch of guys from Washington State attempt to approximate such grooves, you could definitely do worse.
Of course, any good-time vibes had from the band working their mojo get scuppered the minute Orange opens his yap. It's not so bad when he's restraining himself-- indeed, on the album's final track, featuring just Orange and a guitar, he sounds like Nick Drake's awkward younger brother. Not exactly a flattering image, but it's a vast improvement over the caterwauling he offers on the rest of the record. When abetted by the band, his regular singing voice is grating enough. The minute Orange starts "feeling" the moment, whatever tenuous grasp he has on the song's melody goes out the window in favor of a pinched yelp that sounds like the end result of one of the trumpet players dropping a bookcase on his foot.
The worst thing of all: this vocal tack is anchored to obnoxious pearls of wisdom like "If your eyes see no lesson/ And your eyes hear no lecture/ And you can't find a teacher/ Don't doubt the existence of her" or "I'll keep my soul/ You can keep my clothes/ You can keep my house/ You can keep my pain/ You can keep your money"-- it's the sort of insight one would stereotypically expect from an artistically-inclined ex-teenager, but even allowing for such indulgences doesn't make listening to this nonsense any easier. Oddly enough, the fact that "Keep Your Money" (the aforementioned concluding track, and the proud home of the second lyric quoted in the previous sentence) is just Orange and his stilted guitar plucking actually makes the song easier to listen to-- even if the end result is a mess, the pieces fit together. When he's stuck in front of a professional group of musicians, his shortcomings rise straight to the surface, and they go a long way towards making an already dodgy proposition that much harder to like.
