Music Reviews

The Orb

Back To Mine

DMC

The Back To Mine series is in danger of going the way of Global Underground – saturation. Let’s hope things don’t get as ridiculous as Ministry Of Sound, that most famous of electronic juggernauts; and they won’t, because frankly, no one can touch Ministry in terms of pure, unadulterated crap commercialism. Nevertheless, the more _Back To Mine_s that get released in a short period of time, the more chance that bad ones will slip through; and then it will become evident that quality isn’t really that important any more, since people are still buying the CDs, and that’s when it gets ugly.

But I’m jumping the gun. This CD isn’t very good, but we’re not in Ministry Of Sound territory yet. The opening third comprises pretty average tracks from, amongst others, Aphex Twin and Juno Reactor, but they all sit in a barely distinguishable mess, which isn’t an excusable thing since they’re not blended together at all (The Orb think this counts as a mix CD because the last second of a song segues into the first second of the next?). There’s all the stuff you’d expect on a “chill” disc – the token “old-fashioned” hit; some chirpy, quirky party pieces; and let’s not even talk about why “Barbie Girl” got on here. It’s not so much the songs I object to, though; rather, it’s the lack of effort. They’re not mixed, and they’re not even intuitively sequenced. They just sit there like a badly done compilation, except that these tracks are annoyingly combined with the most rudimentary of cross-fading skills. How boring.

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