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8.5
- Bands:
ORANGE GOBLIN - Duration: 00:53:59
- Available since: 1998
- Label:
-
Rise Above Records
Streaming not yet available
Some records are beautiful precisely in their genuine, rough simplicity: Orange Goblin's second work, “Time Traveling Blues”, is exactly that – a concentration of street attitude, psychotropy, vintage science fiction and hallucinations.
Released in 1998 for Lee Dorrian's Rise Above – whose Cathedral, in the same year, released “Caravan Beyond Redemption”, so to speak – the album continues in the wake of “Frequencies From Planet Ten” just a year earlier, the one that started from the cross between Hawkwind, Motorhead, Cathedral themselves, Black Sabbath, Kyuss, Saint Vitus, a splash of Sleep just for fun and then it sets off on a new tangent, in which each of these influences is recognizable from time to time in the warm phrasing and hypnotic sound of the guitars by the Hoare/O'Malley duo, in the reckless drum patterns, in the filthy, vaguely coarse but enveloping vocal timbre of Ben Ward.
Nine songs, almost an hour of music: that's enough for the English to color the last years of the twentieth century with psychedelic, imprinting their very personal trademark on the maturation of stoner metal as we know it today: in their case, without too much sulfur underfoot and with a few extra liters of alcohol, maintaining a 'luminous' underlying energy capable of making them practically irresistible, and unconsciously teaching a whole series of formations in progress or immediately future (from Witchcraft to people like Red Fang or Orchid).
The crackling roar of a motorcycle like the one pictured on the cover, followed by Chris Turner's lilting drums and the lovely rhythmic pulse of Martyn Millard's bass, opens the dance with the immortal “Blue Snow” (one name, one programme): the Orange Goblin don't waste time on pleasantries, it's not really in their style, taking care to throw the listener into a distorted dimension just enough to appreciate how the most dreamlike Seventies mix with the arrogance of street rock'n'roll ( “Shine” is a wonderful example in this sense), all while sitting comfortably on the couch in a basement stinking of rancid beer and smoke, but simultaneously traveling on moon trips – there are still those who have to turn back from there after hearing “Solarisphere” the first time, or vertebrae of the neck waiting to be reassembled after a passage of that little gem of “Snail Hook”, but it is precisely in building similar moments that it resides (slightly changed by the passage of time, but still without rust ) the ability of our people.
Unlike their debut – also beautiful – in this work the five British men dry out their purely seventies component, fattening the sound and attitude with a layer of heavy riffs that pass through the short instrumental “Diesel (Phunt)” ( paradigmatic, in this sense) as for “Lunarville 7, Airlock 32”, four wonderful minutes and a half in apnea with the same refrain that repeats itself, speeds up, slows down, dilates and contracts at rapid speed, becoming impossible to detach from .
Of course, the desert blues remains in the sticky atmospheres of “Nuclear Guru” and above all in the eponymous track of the album, placed at the end to give the coup de grace (the musical one will arrive only four years later): that indolent progression from streets at sunset and wind in your face, lulled by the notes of the piano, is not only in the writer's opinion the best moment of the album, but also an insight into a genre – stoner metal, precisely – which has an extreme malleability in its DNA, here inextricably linked to the love for Lemmy and co; it filters stickily from the speakers, releasing its very rough power and bewitching with the sound of “We own the sun, we own the sky/We own tomorrow and we wanna fly“.
Surely “Time Traveling Blues” did not shatter the world of metal music by irreversibly altering its course but, with its unique sound, greasy with engine grease and filthy with desert sand, it outlined a path towards new, very rough, worlds acids. Nowadays, it's still there, inviting and busier than ever.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM