The Orb
Cydonia
MCA Records

The music of your youth has a certain irresistable and permanent appeal. It's hard to forget the soundtrack to the emergence of your own identity. Baby Boomers are famous for their obsessive nostalgia, but a surging demand for '80s music over the last decade tells us that 30-year-olds can be just as sentimental.

Techno listeners don't have Three Dog Night or The Bangles. We've got the Orb. While Trent Reznor was making a splash by expressing his interest in fucking us like animals, the Orb was painting gorgeous, melting ambient soundscapes like "Spanish Castles in the Sky" and minting hypnotic, dub-inflected tracks like "Perpetual Dawn." The Orb was mysterious — it experimented, it stretched tracks out into what felt like an infinity, it pulsed with rhythm and it set the stage for the ambient insurgency that would follow.

And on a hot summer day, you could cruise up and down Mineral Point Road in Madison, Wis., listening to "Little Fluffy Clouds" and dreaming yourself into a sweet electronic trance.

These days, of course, the Orb has faded into the background of the much bigger world of techno, and "Little Fluffy Clouds" is best known as background music for a Volkswagon commercial. But they're still making discs, including Orblivion (1997), a largely forgettable and mostly forgotten disc with a single stellar track, the pulse-pounding "Toxygene."

Will Cydonia bring the Orb back into the forefront of electronic music? It may; though fellow Brits Orbital, Radiohead and Coldcut are carrying the banner these days, Cydonia shows a progressive discipline that indicates that the Orb has continued to evolve. However, the album lacks a coherent feel, and despite the overall quality of its contents, this might slow down any possible rise to prominence.

The album's first track is unsettling. "Once More" deploys conventional melody and soothing female vocals that leave a listener unsure if the Orb will bend its sound toward the haunting, breathy electronica of Goldfrapp, or toward the formulaic treacle of Enya. It in fact does neither, sinking back into a more typical Orblike obsession with dub melodies and surprising solos from alien instruments, but vocalists like Nina Walsh infuse the album with a fresh sound.

Walsh, who gives a jarringly Björk-like performance on "Ghostdancing," sounds a bit out of place against the Orb's backing track — unlike a number of the best tracks by Portishead or Morcheeba, you don't get the feeling that music and the voice are inextricably linked. Despite this — it sounds good. It's not perfect, but it works.

In addition to picking up some tricks from the world of trip-hop, Cydonia has something the Orb has traditionally avoided: neat, clean tracks. While they largely avoid the pat repetition that defines a large part of the techno universe, they also mostly lack the sometimes self-indulgent flowing, swaying, abstract qualities that have defined Orb tracks in the past. "Restraint" and "structure" are two words not generally applied to the Orb's musical excursions, but they're both present on Cydonia.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Classic Orb tracks are challenging. On initial listens, they're utterly surprising. And, oftentimes, they're dull or irritating. That can't be said for the music of Cydonia, which is at once more digestible, and more consistently enjoyable.

The disc also has some wonderful surprises. After more thoughtful tracks, one song pumps with a hard techno beat that would drive a van full of ravers into dancing fits — it's irresistable. I instinctively turned it up, and then checked the name. It's called "Turn it Down."

Cydonia's all over the map. It's got lovely vocals, liberal use of pitchwheels, tripped-out sound collages, computerized voice samples, ambient, trance, trip-hop and unidentifiable sounds from a few universes over. But the damn thing's like a stew — it's hearty and delicious. Fill up your platter.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)