New Orwell album and free track!
aaamusic | On 06, Jan 2011
Over the space of three albums, Orwell have acquired a reputation as one of the world’s foremost purveyors of classic, beautifully crafted pop music of the kind that seemed to all but disappear around the time that Brian Wilson took to his bed, Nilsson hit the bottle, and Bacharach and David starting suing one another. The band’s last album, Le génie humain, was their first to reach the UK, where it garnered wildly enthusiastic reviews from such authorities as the Sunday Times and Mojo. “Done badly,” wrote the Sunday Times reviewer, “this orchestral pop would become the worst kind of lounge music; but done with the wit and musicality that Orwell display, they carry you along with them.” “The synthesis that Didelot has achieved is seamless,” wrote Mojo. “Le génie humain is set apart by its beautiful arrangements . . . an exquisite and subtle album.”
Though it functions as an ever-shifting band, Orwell is essentially a vehicle for the songs of Nancy-based Jérôme Didelot. And now, Jérôme has taken Orwell’s music a stage further with the ambitious Continental. A conscious attempt to get beyond his (impeccably furnished) comfort zone, Continental draws inspiration from whole new areas of music from the 60s and 70s, and also takes Orwell into deeper philosophical waters. Thankfully, however, Jérôme’s melodic gifts are still very much to the fore.
He explains: “I thought it would be interesting to try some new things in the way I make music with Orwell. Although I’m proud to be part of a band known for producing interesting indie pop, I’ve always had the feeling that some of my influences have never really come through in Orwell’s music. For instance, the first Eno albums are some of my all-time favourites, and I always liked the early days of electronic music and Krautrock – bands like Cluster, Neu! and Kraftwerk, as well as Bowie’s Berlin albums. But I know it would have been pointless for me to start making music like that out of the blue. That’s why I started to wonder how I could integrate some of these elements into the music I feel most at ease with when I write – let’s call it ‘classic pop’.”
While reconfiguring his working methods, Jérôme also began experimenting with some unusual instruments, in particular those associated with the first stirrings of electronic pop, such as Moogs, rhythm boxes, Farfisa organs, Crumar synths, and the instrument that gave many children of the Sixties and Seventies their introduction to the world of music-making (while becoming iconic through its appearance on Bowie’s Space Oddity) – the Stylophone. And somehow, working with these slightly other-worldly instruments led Jérôme to create a soundscape of his own, which in turn evoked an imaginary world that shared boundaries with that of Gabriel García Márquez’s great work of magical realism One Hundred Years of Solitude (which Jérôme had only recently read).
“It’s the kind of book – so rich and original – that haunts you for weeks after you’ve read it, and you don’t know why. I was particularly interested in the way you can link the destiny of a family with the destiny of a city or a country. And so Continental began to grow around the idea of a family running an imaginary country somewhere in the centre of Europe, hidebound and in decline. But I didn’t want to tell a proper story, just to have a background against which to create some interactions between characters, and to evoke specific emotions.”
Of course, the phrase ‘concept album’ became toxic for most critics shortly after the arrival of punk, neatly encapsulating the pomp and portentousness to which so much rock music had succumbed. Yet Continental is far from being a return to the days when earnest acolytes would attempt to simultaneously imbibe music, story and artwork in the hope of penetrating to some immutable truth.
For one thing, the listener doesn’t need to hack through jungles of metaphor and symbolism to discover the parallels between Jérôme’s mythical land and our own troubled world. For another, in stark contrast to the gloom that traditionally enshrouds your average concept album, Continental is for the most part a sun-dappled work – further enhanced by the delicately surreal drawings of Norwegian artist Katrin Berge – that actually leaves you feeling better for having heard it. For despite Jérôme’s desire to stretch into new terrain, the album is still awash with the kind of lush harmonies and evocative instrumentals that Orwell fans have come to expect, while lyrically pointing the way to a future untroubled by the irrational fears and tribalism that hamstring so much of our political thought. The unnamed land of Continental is in a period of transition, its rulers aware that the old models of society no longer serve the interests of its people – fearful and suspicious of change, yet knowing deep down that it is their only hope of survival. Beyond its borders, however, visionary ways of living – untrammelled by the past – have already begun to evolve, while ideas of national identity are being forged into something more malleable. Yet these new ways are still unstable and fraught with danger.
The beauty of Continental, though, is that the listener can give its underlying concept as much or as little attention as they please. What most will notice instantly is that songs like the title track, On This Brightful Day, A Long Way To The Start, Always, and The Wife, The Battlefield are as fresh and memorable as anything Orwell have recorded – only now with a greater than ever range of textures and rhythms underpinning Jérôme’s melodies. The stick that is often used to beat contemporary musicians who write classic pop songs is that they are somehow backward-looking, pining for a long-vanished golden age. With Continental, however, Jérôme has made himself immune to such attacks once and for all. For while this is music that has all the qualities associated with the golden age of pop, unmistakeably its heart and soul is very much engaged with the present – and the future . . .
