Orbital
The Blue Album
ATO Records

I recently made the mistake of telling a 15-year-old that techno is among my favorite genres of music. This garnered a "really?" so laced with icy contempt that it shook me to the core.

Could it be possible that techno is no longer cool?

Ten years ago, bands like the Orb, Aphex Twin, KLF and the Ninja Tune collective rode proudly at the forefront of the avant garde, hacking and slashing their way off the dance floor and into the stereo systems of audiophiles from Belfast to Boston and Berkeley.

Orbital, a British band consisting of the brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll, was the best of the best. Its luminous hit single "Chime" heralded the beginning of the early '90s techno breakthrough; the sufficiently well-regarded "Halcyon + On + On" landed on a handful of movie soundtracks, including those of Hackers and Mortal Kombat.

Not exactly Fargo and Rushmore, granted. But techno was, and still is, a marginal genre, populated by masses of faceless DJs who churn out formulaic dance standards, peppered by a crafty few toiling thanklessly to create something new.

In Sides, a double album that was the high water mark for Orbital's ambition, was a lesson in what purely electronic music could accomplish. Thickly layered, constantly evolving and sprawlingly ambitious, it took more lessons from the orchestration of classical music than it did from Plastikman or Daft Punk.

Therefore, there's something tragic about the sporadically competent mish-mash that is Orbital's Blue Album. It's a deeply flawed final effort for the now-disbanded group, coming on the heels of two strong but uneven CDs, The Altogether and The Middle of Nowhere.

It starts off with darkly urgent tracks that hearken back to the best moments of The Altogether and the strongest leitmotif of the spookily brainy Snivilisation. "Transient," with its George Martin-inspired string section, distorted pipe-banging percussion and harpsichord-sounding electronic piano, is one of the album's best. It's the soundtrack to a midnight snowstorm in a dirty city.

"Transient" is followed by "Pants," which is classic Orbital trance — soulless, pulsing and haunting, perfect music for night driving. "Tunnel Vision," the next track, starts with a riff that recalls the beginning of Depeche Mode's "Waiting for the Night," only to drift into a groove that suggests the sinister, schizophrenic cousin of Christopher Tyng's "Futurama" theme song.

The album then hits its high point, a virtuoso moment that recalls the sharpest of Snivilisation. "You Lot" builds slowly to a sample from the TV drama "The Second Coming," an outraged pronouncement against man's slow usurpation of God's role as creator and destroyer — without the attendant responsibility for the consequences. After its searing peak — the sample is hauntingly served up like a human head on a Doric column — the rest of the track is a thrillingly rocky descent into the dark bowels of electronica that Orbital has mined so well and so often.

Unfortunately, Blue Album is all downhill from there. "Acid Pants" rides on the aggravating repetition of a single sample ("When the laugh track starts, then the fun starts"). It's a one-trick pony like so much of modern techno's cro-magnon ancestors ("Elevator Up, Elevator Down," anybody?), except that it lacks any of the whimsy or addictive replayability that sometimes redeemed the old one-note rave standards. "Easy Serv" is a combination of warm tones and shrill-but-happy synth strings that may have been intended as ironic, but is ultimately just aggravating to listen to.

The album closes with the 8-minute-plus "One Perfect Sunrise," a track title — and length — that seems to promise a sprawling piece of ear candy akin to "Halcyon + On + On." Tragically, despite a solid dance beat, the track fails to deliver. Lacking even a pretense of tension or complexity, and absent the gorgeous warmth of the Opus III sample that powered "Halcyon," "One Perfect Sunrise" is one perfect bore.

And with that, one of the oldest and most distinguished names in techno fades from the scene, wrapping up 15 years of pioneering electronica not with a bang, but with a whimper.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)