The Orb - The Dream (Dragonfly)

For others there is simmering unfinished business or egos to be smoothed over and the promise of musical gold to be reclaimed. Some merely see it as a chance to have a 'kickabout', suck in the beergut and dive into the older, wider adulation that fell at their feet all those years ago...

So to The Orb. Musical mavericks from the golden age of when dance music came to prominence from murky underground roots, illegal raves in warehouses (ask yer mums) the Criminal Justice Act and Top of the Pops (RIP) was a weekly event.

You could see the KLF dressed as ice cream cones, have the Orb release the longest single to chart (18 minutes Blue Room) and be baffled by the cross pollination on show as ecstasy took hold of the music and the possibilities of what could happen both musically and spiritually. Phew! It also helped that they had a distinctly British sense of humour that crept into their music, through samples, inflatable sheep at live shows and could craft beautiful unfolding works that very nearly captured the essence of their fabled 'little fluffy clouds'.

The Dream goes some way to revisit the days when the term ‘ambient house' meant more than nice décor on a home improvement show. It would be fair to say this is a nostalgic look back to more innocent days in the Orb's career.

Following on from initial success Dr Alex Paterson ploughed a lonely path into deeper dub and avant-garde/tune excursions that left the charts and the public consciousness. So for this release he is reunited with his original cohort Youth and delivers more of the familiar yet soothsome sounds for happy, drifting, soulful, dub-flecked electronica ideal for the early-morning post-full-on-rave-club-come down or, as the years advance, music for a nice cup of tea and a sit down.

Warm eastern washes of sound, vintage vocal samples, and a burbling bass line The Dream promises to burst into the mutha of all tunes before changing its mind. Vuja De with its diva warbling seems to be beamed directly from 1990. Switching between soulful tracks such as A Beautiful Day (which juxtaposes the self-mocking sample "a beautiful day/…without a cloud" next to a plummeting scream), The Truth Is..., pounding dub workouts Katskills, Lost and Found, the rolling, ragga cascade of Mother Nature, the O'Jays sampling DDD and many ambient sample-strewn interludes this is classic Orb territory.

No new ground broken. No glo-stick/daft haircut stabs at credibility. Some old haunts revisited. Shameless? Perhaps. Anyone else doing a similar musical pot pourri to such goofed-out, quality chill? No. as the good Dr described it, this is simply a follow-on from their biggest album UFOrb, which was a timeless classic. To sum up from the pivotal quote from Something Special "Our people are not equipped mentally to deal with something of this nature, something supernatural".

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