There was no need for Orbital to release a new album. Eight years ago, The Blue Album sent Phil and Paul Hartnoll out on a moderate high note, a career-spanning compendium of their best ideas, if not always the best executed versions of those ideas. It was a perfectly acceptable cap to the decade-plus career of two reliable purveyors of strong-to-amazing dance music full-lengths. Orbital staged a seven-album run (nine if you count film scores) between 1991 and 2004 that produced only one or two outright clunkers. Looking at the ignoble history of electronic producers as album artists, this is hardly the faint praise it might seem.
As one of the most beloved live acts of the first rave era, Orbital could have reunited to profitably play festivals every year without ever putting out new and potentially rep-tarnishing new music. You had to wonder if they looked at the trajectory of their one-time peers over the course of 21st-century so far and worried a little. The last 12 years have been a downer in this regard, with way too many 1990s dance titans staging major comebacks and making embarrassing attempts to look with-it, even as dance culture’s hyper-accelerated trend-hopping had long since passed them by.
So thank whatever god you wish that Wonky mostly finds Orbital deciding to do what they’ve always done best: gorgeous blends of house drive and techno precision, linking airy whoosh and stadium stomp, melodic hook and rhythmic push. These are dance tracks that hit you with the immediacy of pop singles, occasionally erring toward outright throwback territory but usually with just enough juice purloined from club culture’s more recent mutations and underground niches to keep things vital. This doesn’t mean the Hartnolls aren’t still devoted to the sounds of the 1990s, ideas they helped either pioneer or refine, and there are indeed plenty of sonic nods to rave’s (and Orbital’s) most fertile decade.
Orbital tap young goth chanteuse Zola Jesus for a guest spot on “New France”, turning her steely, gothic vocal into the yearnings of a spooky diva in an ultra-bright world– a tech-house anthem that would have worked just as well in the days when Alice Deejay was on the radio. Brighter still, “Stringy Acid” is a rush of all the shiniest, most emotional bits from the first few years of Orbital’s career, a track so beautifully constructed and 3-D rich that you can forgive how unrepentantly stuck in 1991 it is.
But Orbital’s great trick was always to fold the sound of the moment– whether it was the epic sweep or prog trance or the tricky rhythm programming of jungle– into the architecture of their own brand of mass-appeal anthems. It’s a strategy that served them well as pop ambassadors during the ever-shifting 90s, beholden to no one scene but able to communicate some of the thrill to folks who got most of their dance music from Columbia House. They deploy that trick again on Wonky, except now they seem to be translating the current codes of for-the-kids club sounds for an aging audience of Orbital fans who might not be paying as close attention as they did in the past. And so “Distractions” is their take on the half-time lurch of recent techno-tinged dubstep, stripped of the bass drop, but with enough heart-tugging and Orbital-esque melodic curlicues filling up the haunted space that remains, so that it scans more as unique twist than desperate homage.
The only time this pick-and-mix approach to contemporary dance really falters is “Beelzedub”, which attempts to take the distortion of brostep to an almost comically snarling extreme, complete with a headbanging burst of nasty breakbeats in the final third– the kind we haven’t heard since Alec Empire was smashing jungle and feedback together. The problem is that the extreme parts aren’t quite extreme enough, distracting wannabe tough-guy kitsch and a desperate reversion to a played-out style. It’s the only time the Hartnolls come off like old dudes struggling to outdo the young roughnecks.
And yet despite occasionally stumbling in this quest to keep things short and immediately ear-grabbing, the Hartnolls haven’t lost their knack for gracefulness, tracks that seem to effortlessly build to goosebump-inducing climaxes. If anything, they’ve managed to work within mainstream dance music’s current vogue for radio-friendly track lengths without abandoning their patented crest-to-the-big-release style. Nor have they forgotten how to extend the live act’s seemingly preternatural knack for pop-rave pacing across the peaks-and-valleys arc of the listening in your bedroom experience, where even the bridge between the shimmer of “Stringy Acid” and the ugliness of “Beelzedub” feels natural. Wonky has the one-jolt-after-another vibe of a great collection of familiar hits but without the disconnected feeling you get when a bunch of obviously Big Moment singles are slapped together and called an album, rather seamlessly covering a whole lot of musical ground without sacrificing concision or intensity. It’s not perfect, but it is an unexpectedly great comeback album that manages to seem utterly “Orbital,” occasionally backward-looking, and yet up-to-the-minute in a not-embarrassing way.