Orbital - Wonky

Apostrophe in the wrong place. Possessive plural.

Good review, mr. Mouthy.

Cheers.

I have purchased a ticket for the Bristol gig. Anyone from here going?

This is great fun. I'm totally feeling the Insides comparisons. An all-out party record that balances head, heart and body very well. Also the first Orbital album I've bothered to check out since the one after Insides. Might have to do a bit of backtracking and listen to the others now.

I wouldn't bother really.

haha, okay. Actually I'm not even sure I've heard all of Middle of Nowhere. Insides was such an important, pivotal record for me (the first couple of paragraphs in Mouthy's review are basically identical to my life experiences), that I think I must've thought "There's no way they can top that" then I heard Style and that Saint thing and thought, "yeah they're not gonna top it".

The best bits of Middle of Nowhere are maybe my favourite Orbital if I'm really honest.

yeah, that first half is really something, and the singles on the second half pretty much rule too

"Spare Parts Express" / "Know Where To Run" / "Nothing Left 1" / "Nothing Left 2" for me.

"Middle of Nowhere" is very fine too and I actually really like "Style", but the other tracks are next level.

lol I think I'm the only person on Earth who really digs "Otono"

I like "Otono", but it's definitely third tier on that album.

Always wanted to hear the Pooka albums actually, I actually have the single for "City Sick" somewhere for some reason, and I remember a friend told me their second album was fantastic.

This Pooka? Shift is pretty interesting, especially for its time (2001), esp the track "One in a Million". My understanding is the sometimes IDMish backing is very much an outlier in Pooka's catalog.

Wonky is on US spotify today; cracking it open now!

one big moment is LOVELY, totally vintage

I just picked up green, brown, and snivilisation w/in the past month or two and they're all v good! It's strange that I have five (!) of their albums now and yet still feel like I'm just getting into them

total first world problems but can I say how irritated I am that the US domestic release of this is an iTunes exclusive

^^^^ otm, super annoying

If you guys want to paypal me I can post you CDs from the UK?

hmm, maybe? let me check how much ordering from amazon.co.uk would be

ha the special edition from amazon.co.uk will cost me $20 with shipping, so I'm gonna go that route; thanks though!

I think "Wonky" is my favorite song of the year so far

It had been bugging me for ages what 'Wonky' reminded me of and it's actually 'Jump And Shout' by Basement Jaxx, the combination of insane build and an MC who's simultaneously on top of the build and part of it.

when are Orbital and Underworld going to synch up their schedules and do a joint tour that I can fly over to the UK to see

mmm hmm

This is extremely enjoyable. I like the experimentation with more analoguey noises.

kind of hard to believe that "Stringy Acid" didn't exist before this album came out, i'm already retroactively inserting it in my mid-late 90s memories

apparently it was an outtake from those days

I'd like to qualify my earlier endorsement by saying that the brostep track is dreadful. All other tracks are good, I particularly like New Fance and Where is it Going?

This album was pretty cool first time I heard it, but I'm just not drawn in enough to really love it. everything's in place, but i dunno.....

saw them on Saturday and they were incredible, seemed to have slashed much of the new stuff out of the set for Australia sadly - though what was there sounds very much of a piece with the old material in that setting.

SO MANY forty-somethings off their faces around us!

I want them to release a real live album so badly

like the UW 3-disc Live in Tokyo set if possible, something more than just an hour

those screeching synths in the end of "One Big Moment" would sound so massive live, c'mon boys

This album was pretty cool first time I heard it, but I'm just not drawn in enough to really love it. everything's in place, but i dunno.....

― Scary Move 4 (dog latin), Tuesday, May 8, 2012 6:33 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yep

album is a con that makes me doubt all of my orbital love ever, but this remix has a nice bit in the middle

https://soundcloud.com/orbital-4/where-is-it-going-steve-mac

credited to steve mac and phil

3 months pass...

huh

What do you mean by "album is a con"?

i don't hear a lot of spontaneous life in most of these tracks, which is especially jarring given what they're trying to do. doesn't even sound rote, sounds contrived. not going to be a convincing argument if these tracks actually create joy for you.

i like "never" though.

I'm increasingly feeling that this album is content rather than music. I still quite like it, and think its their best since Middle of Nowhere, but I don't love it.

>album is a con that makes me doubt all of my orbital love ever

If you'd said this about 90% of The Altogether I might have understood, but wrong target with this one - the great tracks on here still sound great to me, and I've *hammered* this album.

I'm with Bill, this album still sounds pretty f great to me

yeah, it holds up good for me too.

I'm increasingly feeling that this album is content rather than music

This is a meaningless statement.

Only cos I didn't add context; my feeling is actually drawn partly, I think, from the same feeling that caused you to say that New France was "so obviously there for the radio", which you may not have meant as a pejorative, but which I inferred as such.

Yo this album is great!!

Yeah, finally (at last) heard it today myself and love it.

Sorry Nick I still don't know what "content rather than music" means.

Sorry Nick I still don't know what "content rather than music" means.

Did some scribbling to try and explain. http://sickmouthy.com/2012/08/27/four-tet-and-some-thoughts-on-music-as-content/

Ah, I read this as you complaining that it's too functional (within the parameters of how Orbital's music functions).

This strikes me as a particularly odd criticism to make of Orbital (and also Talabot) - I hope I don't sound condescending when I say it sounds like a criticism made by a person who doesn't listen to (or appreciate) much actual dance music.

It's not so much "how dare you complain that music is too functional" - more that I think when you listen to a lot of music that is pretty explicitly functional in that manner then its functionalism no longer exists at the opposite end of a continuum from art/creativity/etc. for its own sake - hence saying "it's too functional to be art" begins to seem as nonsensical as saying "it has too many beats to be art".

More generally I think the idea of wanting music to "transcend its purpose" is a really bad one, not because music should not transcend its purpose but because the idea that it can and should is only propogated by people who are wary of (and hence do not have a good handle on) the alleged purpose to begin with.

What I would say, and I think it gets at roughly the same ballpark feeling, is that Wonky feels like an album purposely designed to "tick all the boxes" for an Orbital box except the box of "creates at least one new box". Its problem is that it's precisely as functional as Middle of Nowhere, and as such feels like a retreat into safe territory.