A Sense of Doubt blog post #4025 - THE PAINTER - William Orbit's first album in Eight Years - Music Monday for 2602.23

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4025 - THE PAINTER - William Orbit's first album in Eight Years - Music Monday for 2602.23

How did I Miss This??

And it dropped almost four years ago.

I just discovered that there is a new William Orbit album, and I have been basically listening to it on repeat ever since.

Even though I saw some negative reviews, I think it's excellent!!

That's all. What else to say but listen to it!

Happy Music Monday.

Thanks for tuning in.

The Painter - William Orbit

https://williamorbit.com/albums/the-painter




https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-orbit-the-painter/

By 

Reviewed August 26, 2022

An icon of ’90s pop-dance crossover who produced Madonna’s Ray of Light, the UK musician returns with his first album in eight years, but the record’s endless-sunset vibes quickly turn cloying.

From landing a Top 10 hit with an early dance classic to producing Madonna, London’s William Orbit was a low-key presence at some of electronic music’s most important crossover moments. “Fascinating Rhythm,” a 1990 single from his group Bass-o-matic, was a magically haunting bit of slow-motion house, while his Strange Cargo albums were landmark releases, mixing fourth-world electronics with dub basslines, ambient house trills, and new-age atmosphere. Later he worked on Madonna’s Ray of Light and Music and Blur’s 13, stopping only to invent classical trance with his hugely influential cover of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” before getting heavily into cocaine in the 2010s, doing what he describes as his “rock’n’roll excess thing,” and eventually being committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Orbit makes his re-entry with The Painter, his first album since 2014. His productions sound as opulent as ever, daubed with lavish string arrangements, sparkling guitars, and the most polished vocal effects that a lucrative production career can bring. On the opening “Duende,” luxuriously plucked guitar meets gorgeous string sweeps, guest singer Katie Melua’s effusively processed voice, and a slightly anodyne beat. A gilded balloon of ambient pop floating in a directionless waft of relaxation, this is music that doesn’t have to be anywhere in a hurry. “Gold Coast” is another indolent highlight, its plaintive guitar riff, twinkling piano, and electronic squiggles bubbling like hot oil in a lava lamp, while “I Paint What I Can See” (featuring longtime collaborator Beth Orton) makes excellent use of a bassline reminiscent of Orbit’s excursions into dub on Strange Cargo III.

It all sounds very nice, and it is—potentially too much so for The Painter’s overall good. What is, on paper, a tantalizing group of guest singers—including Colombian-Canadian Lido Pimienta and late Tanzanian musician Hukwe Zawose—succumbs to a honeyed stream of premium chill-out moods and expensive sunset feels. “Nuestra Situación,” featuring Pimienta, may be the most telling example: The reggaeton-lite beat nods to genuine musical progress in Orbit’s world, but sees its resistance washed away in identikit synth and piano vibes. Zawose’s sampled vocal on “Heshima kwa Hukwe” endures a similar fate, its edges drowned in Orbit’s ornate blurs.

This is an affliction that hits The Painter time and again, as singers as distinct as knitted-brow electro artist Polly Scattergood and house crooner Ali Love are lost to a Dido-ized soft focus. Orbit claims to focus on “melody, feeling, sonics and narrative” in his work, but it feels like he has gotten caught up in the scene-setting opening paragraphs of an idyllic travelog, rather than developing a story of dramatic depth. The exception to this is the dubbed-out “Epic” mix of “I Paint What I Can See,” a sprawling excursion into astral ambience that closes the album in a grandiloquent wave of distorted guitars and maternal low end, whose electrifying ebb-and-flow brings grit and drama to The Painter’s golden shores. Sadly, this obvious album highlight is only available on the vinyl edition of The Painter, a bizarre decision that only serves to bury Orbit’s best work.

“Epic” aside, The Painter serves up a pastel buffet of friction-free music that proves entirely pleasant in small doses. Over the length of an album, though, it feels like the day-lit nightmare of an interminable sunset, an infinity pool that literally never ends. It’s great that William Orbit is back after some difficult years, but you suspect The Painter may ultimately have been more rewarding to create than it is to listen to. It comes off as a therapeutic act from an artist who, assuming he’s managed his royalties, never really needs to work again, rather than an album that simply had to be made.

https://www.treblezine.com/william-orbit-the-painter-review/

William Orbit : The Painter

by Langdon Hickman

September 22, 2022

It is hard to wash the stench of schmaltz off. William Orbit’s The Painter has its moments, certainly, little curlicues or tricks of sound design and production that perk up the ear, but the melodic and compositional sensibility lean unfortunately too close to a hybrid of bad Massive Attack pastiche combined with the uncanny sensibilities of mainstream pop electronica. This isn’t to say that mainstream electronic work can’t be great; Sylvan Esso, for instance, have been consistently strong, having delivered their strongest and most experimentally delightful record this year. But this particular blend finds a hard time being deeply satisfying, seeming gunshy toward committing either to the artfully deep or the readymade functionality of pure club music. There is an identity crisis at play on The Painter, feeling at times like Orbit isn’t sure whether he wants to explore the abstract and jazzlike limits of the melodic ideas present here, to create a dense and consuming groove or to be a purely melodic vocal-driven project. This seeming lack of a conceptual throughline leads to weaknesses large and small, eroding the record both from the outer edges of it as a complete work as well as microfractures within the songs, choices of production and juxtaposition that wind up confusing rather than widening the lens.

This is so keenly frustrating in part because almost every song has a performance or sonic idea that is compelling and worth saving. Beth Orton, for instance, appears in several places across this record and each time, her sensitivity to the material brings a keen human edge to otherwise deeply synthetic music. But her utilization feels uncapitalized by the production, which neither expands into rich and fibrous jazzlike humanity beneath her nor gives a satisfying sense of artificiality to challenge our standard perceptions of her as a perform. Instead, it feels, sadly, more like a standard pop electronica piece with an incredible vocalist on top. Similar missteps occur with the collaboration with performers like Hukwe Zawose and Lido Pimienta, who each provide compelling performances that wind up married to subpar production which shimmers with the gloss of a million-dollar job but without the character or soul needed to really drive those performances either into the beating heart of intimacy or the wide beaming lights of absolutist pop.

The Painter offer suffers from a confused aim, seeming unsure of what space or how much of it it wants to take up. The result is a record that seems frustratingly incapable of rising beyond background music, like it was born to be a soundtrack for a film or video game or TV show but not to demand attention drawn to itself. It’s not hard to imagine these pieces brought to life by some image-driven component. “Colours Colliding” for instance calls to mind a meditative walk in the snow, drifts swirling in the air and dropping to the ground, the crispness of icy air and the coziness of knitted wool wrapped around you in hands and scarves and gloves and sweaters. Each of these pieces feels tantalizingly close to something that could be powerful and some, like the aforementioned track, achieve it, despite minor grievances in somewhat cliched melodies or production movements. If the album were perhaps more committed to an ambient sensibility, moving more toward textural work rather than pop-aligned work, it could achieve a painterly palette; for a pop record, it lacks that definitive boldness or heart-bared sincerity that makes work in those fields work. It is capably produced, revealing Orbit’s mastery of the studio as an instrument. I just wish it had better (or more consistent) songs to back that up.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/28/william-orbit-the-painter-welcome-return-of-the-classy-dance-master

It’s good to have William Orbit back. After a brief and unrewarding dabble with drug addiction, the veteran English musician had a comeback of sorts with 2021’s patchy Starbeam EP, but The Painter is a more satisfying return. Orbit’s definitive work is surely All Saints’ Pure Shores, where sleek, subliminal layers of electronic effects add depth and wonder to its gorgeous melodies. While there’s no sign of Orbit resuming that imperial phase when he was first-pick producer for Madonna and U2, his distinctively ambient-classical take on dance-pop proves surprisingly durable.

Longtime collaborators Katie Melua and Beth Orton seem almost smothered by his efforts here, but there’s a gentle grandeur to first single Colours Colliding, with Polly Scattergood giving it her best Björk among some lovely strings and piano. It would be nice to have more dancefloor-friendly beats, like the Despacito dancehall kick powering Nuestra Situación, but there aren’t many artists who could create Heshima kwa Hukwe, a tribute to departed Tanzanian singer Hukwe Zawose without seeming grimly exploitative. Like the album as a whole, it’s slightly overlong and unnecessarily repetitive, but clearly made with great care and affection.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2602.23 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3889 days ago & DAD = 543 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.