Short Reviews [Orange Clocks - 2020 - "Metamorphic"]

The Rushden rockers are back with their second album, following on from 2017’s ‘Tope’s Sphere 2’. Whereas that album featured 20 “songs”, this contains just seven but is still just under an hour in length (which is what happens when the last song is nearly half an hour – which has an incredibly annoying lengthy gap to create a “hidden song”. Guys, it was not clever back in the Nineties when it was somewhat de rigeur and it definitely is not in 2020). Here they are mixing psychedelic stoner desert rock, spacerock and krautrock to create a sound which will be enjoyed by those who want to imagine a band formed by the coming together of Hawkwind, Gong, Kyuss, Can and Ozric Tentacles. One of the real standouts for me is the bass playing of Derek Cotter, who often distorts his sound so much that the rest of the band can actually sit on the sounds coming out of his amp, they are that rich and thick. It is when the band allow their more space rock influences to come through when they are at their most enjoyable, as this is when they come across more like Hawkwind than anyone else, or at least if the mighty ‘wind were also using drone techniques. But overall this is a band who appear at time to be almost marking time waiting for the next idea to come through, and the result is something which is pleasant and enjoyable to listen to, whether I would make the effort to dig this out to play it yet again is another matter altogether. This really is an album where those into this style of music need to play prior to purchase and make up their own minds, but for me there is just too much repetition to make it a truly consistent release.