posted: 2024-06-21 Blue Album Orbital

Orbital’s decision to call it a day after 15 years seems more like a result of the crisis in dance music than, as the press release darkly hints, that the two Hartnoll brothers have spent too long together in confined studios.

The duo’s seventh and final album is a far cry from the days when they took acid culture into the mainstream with the classic “Chime”. The Blue Album is more subtly beats-based than its predecessors; it has lengthy, almost classical sequences, and dark textures that are hard work at first but gradually reveal a haunting depth and beauty.

The Blue Album fails at its most conventional - the aimless Sparks collaboration “Acid Pants”. Elsewhere, the duo’s trademark hooks and sounds are subjected to new twists and environments.

At their best it sounds like a collision between Kraftwerk and Philip Glass’s work for the film Koyaanisqatsi. The Blue Album may confuse some of the Hartnolls’ more pop-oriented fans, but it suggests that the pair might be better off turning out film soundtracks as a career than jacking it in altogether.

Dave Simpson, The Gurdian (2004)