Record Exchange Boise

Reviews:

When reviewing the Orb, it's practically against the law not to mention their place in the establishment of chillout electro-beat-almost as a potential disclaimer/buffer against any real criticism of the music's potential obsolescence. Bicycles & Tricycles is the first significant album of all-new Orb material since Cydonia, that 2001 plate of cold Orblivion-era leftovers, and even if Paterson and crew haven't toyed much with their formula (you want whimsical burbling instrumentation and zany vocal clips, you got 'em) the immersive pulse-drone of the album takes a few welcome detours into whatthehellsville. The 12-inch mix of "From a Distance" is a seething, Prodigious super-macro rudeboy-house vocoder blitzkrieg, sounding far too big for any space smaller than a football arena; its downtempo dub-fuzz opposite, "Tower Twenty Three," is Augustus Pablo coming down off E in the bathroom of a 22nd-century London tube station. Otherwise, this is familiar stuff: while you only need to sketch in a couple lines to the Orb blueprint to upgrade it to Euro-chic '04 microhouse spec, tracks like the relentless bongo rhythm "L.U.C.A." and the click-churn wheelspin of "Gee Strings" keep any potential new-sound bandwagoneering to a warmly throbbing, traditionalist minimum. But though his act's been usurped by its wild-eyed offspring-the chillier Luomo, the trippier Four Tet, the just-plain-cooler Junior Boys-Paterson simply looks irrelevance in the eye, shrugs and goes about his business. And business has no choice but to boom.