Armchair herbalists of a certain age will recall the heady days of 1990 or thereabouts, when chillout music (how quaint that term seems now) was supposed to be the future. The Orb’s first album, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, featured Pink Floyd bassist Guy Pratt and a shot of Battersea Power Station on its sleeve. With their evident prog influences and the ambitious scale of their music, Alex Paterson’s band were more or less the Floyd you could consume without leaving the club, and the fact that Floyd frontman David Gilmour has now recorded with them comes as no surprise.
Metallic Spheres is made up of two 25-minute tracks (Paterson tells us that this was a way of enabling listeners to download an album’s worth of music from iTunes for the price of two singles), each of which is split into five movements. Not that the transition between them is always obvious: as usual, the music blurs boundaries and shapes, focusing on textures rather than repeated motifs. Gilmour’s sparse guitar lines float most subtly above the beats and bass laid down by Paterson and guest bassist Youth on Metallic Side, while a fatter groove underpins Spheres Side. Other than that, there isn’t much to call between them: like much recent Orb music, the songs occasionally drift into wallpaper territory. Then again, you probably shouldn’t try to absorb Metallic Spheres in full unless you’re a Gilmour freak: play it during a long drive and it’ll make most sense.
