Album Review: The Orb feat. Lee Scratch Perry - The Observer In The Star House

In their respective fields they don't come anymore heavyweight than The Orb and Lee 'Scratch' Perry. Based around producer Alex Patterson, The Orb provided the chilled comedown to the noisy late-'80s UK acid house party, produced a number one album in the process and have continued to experiment with dub, downtempo and 'dance' music ever since.

Now in his 70s, Perry has been a dominant figure in the evolution of Jamaican music since the 1960s, demonstrating an incredible prolificacy and a wide-screen approach to creating music. This has paved the way for a full-length collaboration, The Observer In The Star House. No doubt inspired by Perry, The Orbsters could have been forgiven for bowing down and attempting to recreate his classic dub sounds; rather, they have taken him out of his comfort zone (though that he even has one is debatable) and given him more Orb-like backings to add his unique vocals. Many of these multi-layered backdrops include some sort of restrained 4/4 kick, along with bass-heavy, dubwise elements, and Perry immediately becomes at one with the music, taking control like some sort of musical deity, “I am the man in the skies” he proclaims, commanding the music to build and drop, ebb and flow.

Though on face value Perry's poetics often sound like the ramblings of a pensioner losing his faculties, the history of the man gives every word a degree of THC-drenched profundity. The highlight of the set must be Golden Clouds, a remake of The Orb's '91 hit Little Fluffy Clouds, Perry's visions of his childhood most unlike Ricki Lee Jones'. A no-brainer collaboration, The Observer In The Star House is version excursion from two intergenerational kings of dub, delivering on every level.