Send "Orange Juice " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 By the time Orange Juice released an album-- 1982's You Can't Hide Your Love Forever-- their early 45s were already the stuff of frustrating legend. Their first home, Postcard Records, had come and gone and left the band in the unfortunate position of having a stellar reputation based on material few could now hear. Everything they subsequently did was judged against those initial releases-- four lost singles which defined lovelorn, literate indie pop. Combined with their sputtering commercial fortunes, it gave Orange Juice an air of underachievement. Come the CD age and those first blasts of inspiration were well served-- compiled and recompiled, most recently on 2005's The Glasgow School. For most of the last decade it's been the group's later career that's fallen into shadow.This is a band long defined by unavailability. But no more: New box set Coals to Newcastle isn't just a lavish retrospective, it's the complete Orange Juice. More complete than complete, in fact: As well as The Glasgow School, a radio sessions CD, and a DVD, each of the group's four albums gets an expanded disc to itself, which means the six-song Texas Fever is saddled with barely different alternate mixes. But most of the wealth of extra material is worth a play-- Orange Juice were never shy of throwing experiments onto B-sides, and tracks like "Tongues Begin to Wag" are droll sketches of their working process. The most treasurable rarity here, from a 1981 John Peel session, is "Blokes On 45", a medley of those early singles set to a faux-disco backbeat and a vision of proto-indie as an oldies' circuit variety turn. That was the essence of Orange Juice: They were always self-conscious, and they were usually very funny. The former came with the post-punk territory-- at the end of the box set there's a radio interview where Edwyn Collins talks about being "into" something then chastises himself for sounding like a hippie. The latter was more unusual, but wit and self-deprecation are what links the jangle and rush of their first releases with the louche pop-soul precision of their final ones. That and Collins' immediately recognisable voice-- a plummy, permanently amused croon. Collins was very cautious of pigeonholing-- he'd emerged talking about fusing pop and soul and then ended up sitting on the sidelines while the s-word became the era's most overused. He resisted the idea that Orange Juice's career was a steady progression towards slickness. But that's unavoidably what it sounds like. You Can't Hide and second album Rip It Up are full of spashy, amateurish collisions of pop, funk, indie, and latterly African sounds which somehow resolve into joy. But by the final, self-titled LP there's a muscle and poise on tracks like "What Presence?!" and "Salmon Fishing in New York" that's completely absent from the band's earlier work....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Orange Juice formed in 1979 and enjoyed plenty of critical acclaim in the UK press. From early 1980 a string of excellent 7” singles had the group deservedly marked for stardom or legend. They appeared on both the Tops of The Pops and Old Grey Whistle Test television shows, did sessions for BBC radio (including John Peel) and had a memorable hit single with “Rip It Up” which put the Roland 303 synthesizer through its most squelchy paces. Yet the bosom of the record-buying public remained mostly cold and distant. So, there remains a simple case for Orange Juice as one of the most underrated and under-appreciated groups of all time. After all these years their gloriously ecstatic sound still hits the gut and the brains with equal force; crisp disco-punk guitar lines dueling with oblique rhythms and crooned lyrics dripping with irony and whimsical good humor. Few bands have been as successful in juxtaposing the glamorous with the humdrum. Thus, Orange Juice always sound as if they are simultaneously trying to get you onto the dance floor and crying into your shandy. Their earliest work makes plain a devotion to the raw simplicity of the Velvet Underground, US soul music, and the Buzzcocks. An appreciation for dub and country music, art and mythology would also become apparent. Such a balance of emotion and intellect might have been a load of old nonsense if they’d not had, in Edwyn Collins, a group leader capable of emphasizing primal enjoyment as much as detailing romantic pain and philosophy. Across this collection, Collins infuses everything with an air of slightly foppish wit, yet never lets the music drift too far from the raw and the real. Sounding both gentle and upbeat, with hindsight, he seems almost a blueprint for Morrissey (if the latter loved soul and reggae music as much as he loved himself). Incidentally, that’s no diss of Morrissey. Far from it, for in the mid-late 1980s, I would debate anyone on his lyrical prowess versus that of Elvis Costello. Around the same time period, another big stink was brewing as shiny compact discs were raising their ugly head and being chuntered against by all true vinyl lovers. The format seemed impressively flash, but sounded shallow and often still does. The album cover as art was set to be made virtually extinct by something squat encased in an easily breakable clear plastic case. Even worse, record companies began a CD reissue program of whatever they considered were classics, starting with, I dunno, Beatles, Billy Joel, Phil Collins, Pink Floyd, Santana, Stones, to the detriment of new releases and worthy older ones. It was just business, of course, but from time to time some CD-bearing unfortunate would wander into my verbal cross-hairs. If they knew something about a broader musical landscape and answered back then, if all else failed, I would fall back onto the ultimate trump card and cry: “Just admit it you [expletive deleted]. They will never compile and release all the Orange Juice A & B sides and sessions and flexi-discs and 12-inch singles and dub versions on CD, so fuck off you [different expletive deleted]”. ...full text |
| Clashmusic |
| A post-punk pop band with limited chart success and a fluid personnel may not seem the obvious recipients of a definitive collection of their recorded output, but Orange Juice were always far from obvious. Shamelessly erudite and delightfully frenetic, they were never likely to win mass appeal, but lyrics like “Here’s a penny for your thoughts / Incidentally, you may keep the change” deserve to be heard again. Frontman Edwyn Collins’ remarkable musical return after suffering two cerebral hemorrhages has already ensured he is responsible for one of 2010’s essential releases and, with this box set, you can make that two. Under-appreciated gems like ‘Untitled Melody’, ‘I Can’t Help Myself’ and ‘What Presence?!’ still dazzle while each studio album has much to enjoy. Quite how essential various 12” dub versions are is debatable, but the ‘BBC Sessions’ disc offers unpolished and frankly invigorating takes on tracks from across their catalogue. On this occasion, being comprehensive equates to offering more than you want but, with all of their studio releases remastered and accompanied by a beautiful booklet, you’ve got everything you need....full text |
Orange Juice lyrics
|
| |||||||
