Most electronic music acts are fairly easy to work out. Not so Orbital, a British duo whose career has been marked by distinct phases of not quite fitting into scenes, from the not exactly techno of 1993’s ‘Orbital’ (aka The Brown Album) to the not really drum & bass of ‘Snivilisation’. ‘Orbital’, the band’s 1991 debut album — also known as ‘The Green Album’ to distinguish it from their second eponymous LP — is the band’s not quite rave album. It’s a record of snarling riffs and heart-breaking melody that skirts around the rave scene rather than submerging in it, like the M25 motorway from which the band took their name does to central London.
Plenty of people will disagree with this assessment. The Orbital brothers, Phil and Paul Hartnoll, made their initial breakthrough with ‘Chime’, a rave anthem par excellence; and the 11 tracks on the ‘The Green Album’ — which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year — would doubtlessly have worked at a 1991 rave. But the album’s melodicism, shifting beats and atypical structures suggest a step onward from rave, pointing towards the electronic home listening that Warp’s epochal ‘Artificial Intelligence’ compilation would nail in summer 1992, in a way that Dominator’s ‘Human Resource’ most certainly did not.
A more apposite historical comparison would perhaps be Autechre. Autechre and Orbital would go on wildly differing career paths over their respective four-decade careers. But if you listen to Autechre’s two contributions to ‘Artificial Intelligence’, they don’t sound that far from what Orbital were cooking up on ‘The Green Album’ tracks like ‘Steel Cube Idolatry’ or ‘High Rise’ — all clean melodic lines and idiosyncratic beats. This makes the ‘The Green Album’ an important jumping off point for Orbital, an insight into why they would go on to become one of the most enduring electronic music acts, appealing to rock fans, home listeners and festival crowds alike.
Key to the album’s appeal, both indoors and out, is the strong melodic thread that runs through its 11 tracks (in this case, I am talking about the original UK edition — the US album release differed significantly). ‘Chime’, their breakthrough song, has a descending synth melody so effortlessly catchy your milkman could whistle it, its lolloping air suggesting a Slinky’s elastic amble down a nightclub stair. ‘Belfast’ makes exceedingly good use of a sample of soprano Emily Van Evera performing ‘O Euchari’, building a scaffold around it of whistling synth lines and stately piano chords that match Van Evera’s regal dignity. (In a sign of the song’s enduring quality, ANNA recently released two remixes of ‘Belfast’ as part of Orbital’s ‘30 Something’ celebrations.)
At other times the duo’s melodic smarts are employed to rather more evil ends: ‘Speedfreak’ has one of the most catchily iniquitous riffs in the history of electronic music, a five-note pattern that moves into your brain and rearranges the cerebral furniture, while ‘Midnight (Live)’ introduces an LFO-style blast of cold synth steel to a wall of distorted guitar.
On paper, this might suggest a fairly typical rave act — particularly as The Beloved used the same Emily Van Evera sample on their own early-morning classic ‘The Sun Rising’ two years previously. But the ‘The Green Album’ is an expansion of the rave template on a grand scale, with the Hartnoll brothers sowing a kind of naive complexity into their work. Orbital were not exactly using the highest-quality recording studios at the time — the original version of ‘Chime’ was recorded in "a knocked-through stair cupboard that my dad set up as a home office” according to Paul Hartnoll — and the resulting recordings feel a little ragged around the edges, with little of the visceral noise appeal of, say, The Prodigy. But this was tempered by a harmonic complexity and exploratory spirit that thought nothing of piling more hooks and parts into a song than would be strictly necessary for a dancefloor hit.