Let's dream a dream of classic Orb music. What would it include? Long, rangy dub basslines, undoubtedly. Twinkling snatches of suggestive melody, maybe. Certainly a couple of vocal samples, drifting in and out of tracks like happy mental flotsam. And then... the big-lunged diva on top of it all, delivering the group's message of positive empowerment through song? Wait a minute-- something's wrong there. As you wake up suddenly, your early 1990s reverie is shattered by the affectless gospel stylings of that anonymous singer. You fold your tie-dyes away, kick your beanbag into a corner, disconnect your VR goggles, and ask, "Orb, where did it all go wrong?"
The Orb have presented The Dream as a return to both form and freedom. On the one hand, they cut loose from the deadening expectations of record labels and made it themselves; on the other, they've promised the fans a return to the cosmic roamings of Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld and UFOrb. Dr Alex Paterson is reunited with Youth and Steve Hillage, and longtime collaborator Thomas Fehlmann-- whose commitment to a drier kind of ambience helped lose much of their once-huge fanbase-- is absent. If happy, hippie times were ever coming back, this would be the moment. It isn't, and the out-of-place vocal shenanigans are only part of the reason why.
They are a big part, though. On the comical "Vuja De", a vocalist shouts "It's the way you hold me!" On "A Beautiful Day" she informs us "Sunshine ain't no rain." On "The Truth Is..." we learn "only truth will set you free." And so on. The problem isn't really lyrical banality, though, it's that the presence of vocals fixes the songs into a pop structure which works against the band's more diffuse strengths. And the nature of the vocals-- declamatory deep-house singing-- is an unwelcome injection of extroversion into music that's better suited to mind's-eye visions.
Even beyond the vocals, the Orb's ability to construct a track seems shot to hell. The group in its heyday made drug music, undeniably, but like the best drug music it didn't just enhance the chemical experience, it explained it for non-users. Orb records prepared a generation of students for what being stoned felt like, largely because they unfolded so enticingly, those gradually shifting basslines underpinning a procession of ideas and samples linked as much by whimsy as logic.
The basslines are still here, but where the band might once have fed in one or two edge-of-brain voices and teased out their trippy potential, The Dream is filled with babble. The record samples a heap of stray voices, drawn from sources either hackneyed (radio preachers and politicians) or simply dull (instruction manuals). Even the tracks without singing sound cramped and busy, and the ugly metallic drum sounds the Orb use don't help. Compare these pieces to their Kompakt work and you can't help but suspect that Fehlmann brought useful compositional discipline to the group, even if he did dampen the band's ever-suspect sense of humor.
It may seem unfair to constantly hold The Dream up against music the Orb made more than 15 years ago, but that's the yardstick, and the style, the band is clearly aiming for. And towards the end of the record, they do at least locate the target. "High Noon" mixes delicate piano fragments with the kind of dub bubblebath that made the group's name, while "Codes" lifts sounds from the band's own "Blue Room" and works as a nostalgic ramble around some familiar space-scapes. It's all very pleasant, and so is "Orbisonia"'s closing drift, but even here Paterson's touch with a vocal sample is more wayward and intrusive than it used to be. Ultimately, this particular dream is less one of flight or past glories, and more one of going to work and finding you've forgotten your trousers.
