The Orb have never hidden their art-rock leanings. Their debut album, released in 1991, was a double-vinyl epic entitled, with a knowing nod to the bongs-and-blacklights crowd, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. Despite being marketed as house music, Ultraworld was really designed to flow like those spacey prog-song suites that so captivated stoned 70s kids who gorged on sci-fi novels. (The Orb just ditched the "songs" part of the suite equation.) And though the rhythms on the new Metallic Spheres occasionally recall techno and hip-hop and other more recent inventions, this albums sounds a hell of a lot like it could have been playing in a planetarium circa 1974.
Again, as much of that is due to the Orb as to special guest legend David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. The Orb's music got chillier, tighter, and altogether less shaggy as we moved away from rave's sloppy love-in and toward the precision-tooled club music of the 21st century. But over the past few years, Orb co-founder Alex Paterson has been gently nudging the group's sound back toward its techno-hippie roots. Collaborating with Gilmour feels in some ways like the Orb's coming home after a good many years spent wandering the post-rave wilderness. Their last few albums have sounded as if the band were wondering where exactly they could take their music next, while not quite sure if they truly wanted to revert to their old sound, and the master's presence feels like it gave the disciples license to go all-out retro.
Mostly wordless, full of spaced-out sound effects, and making no concessions to good ol' verse-chorus-verse structures, Spheres is a trip, to use a term once unabashedly uttered by Floyd devotees and revived by Orb aficionados with more of a knowing wink. A headphones record, in other words. Light show and chemical refreshment totally optional. Over two long tracks subdivided into shorter movements, Paterson and fellow Orb-er Youth thread together a post-rave library's worth of slow-rolli [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ng chillout-room rhythms, referencing everything from dub to krautrock along the way, as Gilmour sweeps in and out on guitar, dropping little shiver-inducing melodic runs like it's no big deal. Though his playing here meanders by design, Gilmour sounds neither lazy nor indulgent, more like a virtuoso who doesn't want to actually seem like he's sleepwalking through his performance. The Orb, on the other hand, are showing off in the best way possible, again crafting the lush, cosmic rhythms they were once so good at, hoping to impress a long-time hero. In the process, they also manage to impress listeners who've stuck with the band through some pretty ropey recent material.
Records like Spheres usually get filed as "ambient" these days, but that's not quite right here. Sure, it's gorgeous and hypnotic and more about beats than songs and all the things you'd probably expect from this pairing. It's also immersive in an old-school way, a long-player of a very pre-digital vintage, a record for people with enough free time (or a long enough commute) to lose themselves in a 50ish-minute composition. With its dramatically orchestrated peaks and valleys, it's an album designed to be listened to, to Take You Somewhere as you lay on your bedroom floor, to conjure futuristic images in the mind's eye of folks who were once teenage fans. In that sense, it's still not quite as successful as the Orb's classic material, and a little too subdued, lacking both the goofy sampleadelic grandeur and the ear-grabbing pop pulse of the Ultraworld era. But it's still the most focused and listenable Orb album in years. And hey, if you want to treat it as background music, that'll work just fine, too.
