Perhaps, I still want to listen to The Orb and hear Jimmy Cauty in its sound. Perhaps, I want to feel a kind of a space journey. Or whatever. But not dry micro house or minimal techno, for god's sake.

The Orb are widely considered as originators of ambient music (along with The KLF, another Cauty's project). But by the way 'Okie Dokie It's The Orb On Kompakt' starts off, it becomes obvious mister Thomas Fehlmann applied his touch to the music this time. Comparing to Blue Room or Orblivion times, the sound got less spacey, more sequenser based and much less melodic. Listening to Complication, I suddenly got a glimpse that it's all in one key! Lunik makes an attempt to be the real Orb, but fails. Too monotonous, and the vocals don't exactly fit into The Orb image.

Lolo sounds like Alex Paterson gave a few notes to Fehlmann, who later turned them into a boring loop.

The tide is surprisingly turning on a rubber bass track Cool Harbour, already known by The Orb's single on BadOrb label from the early 2000s. Later tracks are closer to ancestral domain of trance-inducing pulsating ambience, for which we know and love The Orb after all. Before Because even starts with russian language TV sample, what I see as a following the traditions of early Orb's albums.

Hushed environs of the album's second half delivers famous Paterson's cascading melodies and chiming digital suburbia, and in the end you see that The Orb is still on, in the higher charts of downtempo soundscape music.

So to put in short, I dislike Kompakt's name in the album title. It's pointless, I guess The Orb is more important than Kompakt. Second thing, I would fire Fehlmann, he's of no use in The Orb. Let him play his hard boiled music somewhere else, will you Alex?

But again, such an album from a band who once collaborated with Robbie Williams sound unexpectedly and surprisingly good.

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Aulis Vierhovssen
October 2005