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Home » articles » The Orielles: Disco Volador – Review

The Orielles: Disco Volador – Review

March 9, 2020 by Michael Sumsion

The Orielles

Halifax’s finest purveyors of indie ear-candy, The Orielles, stretch out and expand their art-rock sound into dizzy dream-pop and giddy space-funk textures on their magisterial second album, Disco Volador.

On their vivid, buzz-generating 2018 calling-card, Silver Dollar Moment, West Yorkshire’s The Orielles honed a refreshingly idiosyncratic and expansive take on those perennial staples of indie-pop, the gleaming C86 jangle and the furrowed brow of shoegaze. Now harnessing that record’s wonky, throwback charm with a heightened astral soundscape cloaked in euphoric and buoyant primary colours, their sugar-rushing new opus, Disco Volador, sees the trio-turned-quartet unleashing experimental instincts and adding a tropical zest and punch from the furthest reaches of the galaxy: maximalist songs like Come Down On Jupiter and Bobbi’s Second World roll seamlessly between library music’s wooziness, disco’s cosmic bounce and even jazz’s meditative rapture. 

The Orielles - Disco Volodor

Effortlessly summoning ghosts of polyrhythmic funk-pop, Northern Soul and reverb-laden indie-disco anthems while targeting the more wistful reaches of the dancefloor, The Orielles navigate psychedelia and art-rock with dollops of full-bodied chutzpah and frantic imagination. Much to their credit, their myriad influences are subsumed into their alt-pop mantras without coming across as diluted or exploitative. Nostalgic and yet novel, Disco Volador assembles a series of sonic collages that radiate a pillowy alienation and a kinetic strut whilst keenly subverting listener expectations and preconceptions. 

The technicolour Space Samba (Disco Volador Theme) exudes a wide-eyed joy pitched somewhere between Orange Juice, Chic, St Etienne, Danny Krivit and Stereolab; the manicured cowbells, club-rocking, A Certain Ratio-style guitar and vocalist Esme Dee Hand-Halford’s inimitable coo forge an irresistible groove. The fluid Bobbi’s Second World marshals ESG, hip-hop collage and The Mighty Boosh’s Future Sailors. Rapid i stitches together Balearic bliss and Stereolab’s recombinant crate-digging on1997’s Dots and Loops. Even the more conventional tracks eschew modesty and restraint: the mesmeric Memoirs of Miso drapes a yearning sax over a lilting jangle shuffle, Whilst The Flowers Look unspools with a flutter of flutes and swirls of beatific organ against a wall of grizzly guitars.

On occasion, The Orielles’ wandering propensity and obsessive tendencies get the better of them and threaten to cram too many elements into the same tune; if they can hunker down and embrace a more streamlined approach they could conjure a festival-headlining sweet spot that this ambitious set frequently threatens to hit. For now, it offers a rich and irreverent soundscape whose high points strongly suggest there’s a classic record to be coaxed from the precocious outfit’s potent synthesis of creative energy and mastery of form. 

Score: 3/5

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Filed Under: Review Tagged With: Disco Volodor, The Orielles

About Michael Sumsion

Music-fixated English teacher. Loves jazz and reverie on vinyl. A curious soul.

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