The Orb - Metallic Spheres

I Say: I am both a long-time Orb fan and Pink Floyd fan, so this is like a dream come true; except I never would have dreamed that The Orb and David Gilmour would collaborate together! Both artists are known for their spacey, tripped-out music; one featuring echoing, reverbed beats, the other echoing, reverbed riffs. It's like that old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial: You got peanut butter on my chocolate! No, you got chocolate in my peanut butter! Two great tastes that go great together!

Here's what pitchfork says:

Mostly wordless, full of spaced-out sound effects, and making no concessions to good ol' verse-chorus-verse structures, Spheres is a trip, to use a term once unabashedly uttered by Floyd devotees and revived by Orb aficionados with more of a knowing wink. A headphones record, in other words. Light show and chemical refreshment totally optional. Over two long tracks subdivided into shorter movements, Paterson and fellow Orb-er Youth thread together a post-rave library's worth of slow-rolli ng chillout-room rhythms, referencing everything from dub to krautrock along the way, as Gilmour sweeps in and out on guitar, dropping little shiver-inducing melodic runs like it's no big deal. Though his playing here meanders by design, Gilmour sounds neither lazy nor indulgent, more like a virtuoso who doesn't want to actually seem like he's sleepwalking through his performance. The Orb, on the other hand, are showing off in the best way possible, again crafting the lush, cosmic rhythms they were once so good at, hoping to impress a long-time hero. In the process, they also manage to impress listeners who've stuck with the band through some pretty ropey recent material.

Records like Spheres usually get filed as "ambient" these days, but that's not quite right here. Sure, it's gorgeous and hypnotic and more about beats than songs and all the things you'd probably expect from this pairing. It's also immersive in an old-school way, a long-player of a very pre-digital vintage, a record for people with enough free time (or a long enough commute) to lose themselves in a 50ish-minute composition. With its dramatically orchestrated peaks and valleys, it's an album designed to be listened to, to Take You Somewhere as you lay on your bedroom floor, to conjure futuristic images in the mind's eye of folks who were once teenage fans. In that sense, it's still not quite as successful as the Orb's classic material, and a little too subdued, lacking both the goofy sampleadelic grandeur and the ear-grabbing pop pulse of the Ultraworld era. But it's still the most focused and listenable Orb album in years. And hey, if you want to treat it as background music, that'll work just fine, too.

Download:
http://www.mediafire.com/?5th67ab06k4a43h