Orange Juice, Coals to Newcastle

review by dave heaton

If you’re going to take a beloved, often-imitated band whose music is hard to find and put their music back out there, this is the best way to do it – give us everything, an instant landslide for fans and newcomers alike. Orange Juice is up there among the legendary bands most in need of getting their music back out there, and here we go: All four albums, singles, BBC sessions, unreleased stuff. So, now that it’s all here, what to make of Orange Juice in 2010?

Edwyn Collins’ voice is as strange and distinctive as ever. The rough, early stuff, where the guitars are most upfront, is forceful and sharp. The later, soul-and-funk-influenced stuff is a fascinating mix of unlikely forces coalescing. Even after indie-pop bands galore have imitated them (or named themselves after their songs – Blue Boy, Wan Light, etc.), their songs still seem timeless.

Part of their charm is the way they tackle the age-old formula of the sad love song with a persistent cleverness and droll sense of humor. Self-evisceration is more fun, less serious than with their peers and followers. Even bands that mimic their sound nearly exactly still can’t get that magic balance. There’s nuance to their music, and poetry. There’s a particular feeling that Orange Juice generated precisely.

Like all great music, they’re also tuned into what they love about other music, and convey that their own way. They took from great music of the past and created so many iconic moments of their own for others to draw from. The revising implied in “Rip It Up”, their biggest hit in the UK, runs through everything, always tied up with hopes, dreams, wishes and longing. He seems to be constantly writing and rewriting love letters. It’s like the beginning of the soul ballad “Mud in Your Eye”, where Collins is changing his story as he tells it: “I’ll tell you how much I hate you girl / perhaps isn’t true / though it’s not the way it seems / and you could shatter my illusions / but you’ll never haunt my dreams”. It’s a messy, complicated world. As Collins sings on “Lean Period”, “please don’t expect consistency from me”.

So much is about perspective, in love or politics. To quote one more lyric (something easy to do with Orange Juice): “When you say your love is as bold as a flag / I say all I’ve got to show’s a tattered rag”.

{www.dominorecordco.com}