Adrian Orange, the singer and songwriter, is actually a guy, not a girl, and his band on the self-titled album, Adrian Orange & Her Band, is made up of seventeen musicians he refers to as a rambling pack of peyote-laced thieves. Peyote definitely seems to be the operative word here. The songs are tripped-out hippy-pop to the nth degree. The lyrics evoke images of being a free spirit, and while one can’t blame the music for trying to embody that spirit too, one can blame the music for being sloppy and unprofessional, and that’s the case here.
Adrian Orange & Her Band tried to capture their live sound on this album, but it just didn’t work. The horns are so slurred and sloppy that it brings to mind a guy performing cunnilingus on a girl with a rank smelling snatch: sure the guy wiggles his lips around there a bit in hope of getting a blow job in return, but he won’t stick his tongue in and do the job properly, and neither do the horn players. And then there’s Orange’s singing, which is a strange talk/warble that constantly waivers in and out in a slow-motion vibrato.
The music sounds like it’s probably a lot of fun to play, and if I ever got a chance to jam with these guys, party with them, or just catch one of their live shows, I would in a second, but when it comes to listening to what amounts to a bunch of stoned musicians recording their first take of every song in the studio, I have to pass.
