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Andy Partridge
& Peter Blegvad | |
Orpheus - The Lowdown
[Ape House Ltd]
This "Orpheus - The Lowdown" is a nice object, the result of 25 years of friendship and hard work between Andy Partridge, leader of XTC, and Peter Blegvad, guitarist of Slapp Happy, an avant-garde progressive rock band of the 70s, and an artist who collaborated to many projects (the most known of them being his first solo album in 1983, "The Naked Shakespeare", with Andy Partridge on production).
So, "Orpheus, The Lowdown", is a concept album, described by its authors like an initiation travel through tragedy, comedy, poetry and anguish. What is the best way to listen to it? To be dead, because this album "only contains sounds audible by the deads". What a program! But it's a short one for an album recorded on and off during thirteen years: it's only 32 minutes long... Twelve tracks, composed of spoken words on a purely experimental musical background, tripping but tense, with discreet noises, synths, all kind of sounds, with little rhythm, the whole constituting a strange universe, the ideal soundtrack for a road movie: that's what you should be ready for. This kind of work is hazardous because it's much too intellectual to be perceived as a rock record. The fans of the contemporary music, new music and other industrial-experimental of the 80s kind of music (see The Residents) will be a privileged public. Moreover, if you're not fluent in English, you won't understand the lyrics, the spoken words mentioned before, that is to say long, monotonous texts, which are probably very interesting and very poetic but hard to understand for foreigners... Then, there's the music, or rather, the musical background and all the interest dwells here: it hasn't been skimped to the lyrics' profit, it's even very pleasant to listen to, we glide through regions explored by Death In June or SPK. So, "Orpheus - The Lowdown" is what it looks like: a record you can do without but not an uninteresting one. For the fans or the bystanders who want to discover new musical horizons.
Frédéric Thébault |
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