In Sides

Consistency makes you your own worst enemy. People come to expect it from you. Orbital, for example, have never failed to make a good record. They've made loads. I can't keep track of them. I've got them all somewhere, I can't tell one from another and they all sound excellent.

With one exception. Orbital's last album, "Snivilisation", was far from excellent. It was fantastic. A sucker punch to the psyche, one of those bedazzling moments in pop where all the possibilities open up all over again and you discover feelings you never knew you had. At the time, I wrote a gibbering review saying that it was, quite literally, the music of my dreams. I'm proud to say that, like every record I've ever been droolingly, deliriously, embarrassingly enthusiastic about, it still sounds wonderful.

So what to do now Orbital have returned to being merely excellent? They have a masterpiece behind them. They've set themselves an unfair standard.

"In Sides" is a a very approachable record, very user-friendly. It welcomes you in, cossets you, soothes you with he delicious "The Girl With The Sun In Her Head". I'd been under the misapprehension that this was recorded using Glastonbury's wind-power generator, which I always suspected was secretly fuelled by a small kerosene dynamo of ever-changing shifts of pedalling Greens. But no, it was the Greenpeace solar van that powered the track, as warm and bucolic as it's title.

The angular loops which stacked up to something approaching satirical electronic fury on "Snivilisation" are still here, as edgy and expressive and inexplicable as always, but calmer of purpose. "Petrol" is abrasive, but in an amiable, cow's-tongue fashion. For all that it is sinister and inventive, "The Box" is also cooling and languid. My current favourite is "Adnan's", which creeps up like a war machine on rubber coasters. I need to listen to the whole LP a lot more; in a couple of weeks, I'll be telling people that this, this is Orbital's true magnum opus. Right now, it strikes me simply as a sweet experience, an infusion of mild pleasure to the body and brain.

Maybe the Hartnolls need a rest from all that rage and anomie. Maybe we do, too. Maybe I should just call it the first beautiful album of summer and be done with it.

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[ Also: All In Sides reviews ]