Customer Reviews

The World & Everything in It

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been an Oranges Band fan for some time now, and this recording is their best to date. Indeed, it is an excellent summer soundtrack, with track two setting a warm & fuzzy tone. The production on this one is a marked improvement and lends well to their sound. In addition to the great songs, the playing is inspired and Roman's voice is better still. Keep on the good foot, fellows!

This album is amazing. The first five songs are worth a years worth of earnings...hyperbole, perhaps, but this music injects some youth into my sometimes bitter sullen and surly soul.

You can't listen to this album the way you listen to Arcade Fire (if you're a fan of them) or Echo and the Bunnymen's "Ocean Rain" or even Beck. It doesn't involve you that way. Maybe it's not supposed to. It's a contemporary take on beach music, with slow, wavering guitar splashes and songs about wild waves. It sort of defies or rebuffs intense listening, but then it's not always satisfying as mere pleasure music either. (A good example of satisfying mediocre music might be the Thompson Twins' "Into the Gap," which is an indulgent pleasure and utterly inconsequential.) This Oranges Band CD is pleasant but I don't reach for it on my way out the door. However--...

...--there is this one song that is just one of the coolest, thrashiest, most genial riffs I've heard in a while, and that's the song "The Mountain." It starts with lazy, dog-day electric guitar, one chord played over and over, and then suddenly hops into that boiling, happy riff--and returns to it two or three times, too, not hitting it once and then skimping on that pleasure like some music does. And it sounds bouyant, joyous, like Grandaddy's "Summer Here Kids". There's even a Winston Churchill clip (yes, Winston Churchill) in it, telling us to "never give in", a really cheeky, probably inappropriate, but still cool way to top things off on this track.

To sum up, if you're looking into this disc I'd have you sample some of the tracks first and see what you think. I do like it, but it's not in my rotation or anything, though "The Mountain" is one of my favorite new tunes in a while.

Nothing at all stands out on this album. When I finish it I feel like I have wasted my time or I am asleep.