Adrian Orange & Her Band - "Adrian Orange & Her Band"

Adrian Orange & Her Band - Give to Love What's Love's (K 2007)

Adrian Orange & Her Band – Adrian Orange & Her Band / K

There are two opposing characteristics of the music industry that astound me on a regular basis: 1. How many damn bands are out there (a lot); 2. How surprisingly interconnected everything is despite the sheer mass of it. I choose the music I write about by quickly flipping through each and every CD that is shipped to my office, which sounds like a good time I know, but after about four hours of it, you start to fatigue mentally and easily get frustrated. Of the 75-100 albums I sample a week, there are usually only three or four that truly capture my attention; of those, two typically are from bands I am already familiar with, one sells me by an intriguing press release and the final one is just because the music is too curious to not spend a little time with. This week, Adrian Orange & Her Band took the latter prize, practically destroying the competition in the process. I was obviously already familiar with the always-respectable northwest music mecca K Records, but Orange was a name I had yet to come across… or so I thought.

The afrobeat-meets-lo-fi indie-rock was enough to sell the album to me personally—a style that has been increasingly pursued in the last few years, but nothing has quite approached this particular sound—but if the press release had been a little more informative, I would have also been pretty easily sold. If you are a fan of the DIY, typically lo-fi northwest indie scene, then you should have crossed Portland’s Marriage Records by now. Though they have been around since 2003, the sudden popularity of specifically YACHT has finally brought some attention to the excellent DIY imprint. I stumbled across the label a few years back when a sampler found its way into my CD player, and in the process discovered a great set of new musicians including the aforementioned YACHT, Drakkar Sauana, Manta, Little Wings and my two personal favorites Thanksgiving and The Watery Graves of Portland (which I had a pretty big obsession with for a few months, and if you still google my name, on the third page is a link to a lame gushing comment I made on their message board, which happened to be the very first comment on that particular board). Well as it turns out, not only is Thanksgiving the singer/songwriter alias of Adrian Orange, but he also plays drums for the Watery Graves, a chamber-jazz trio. Not to mention, Orange is in fact one of the founding members of the label itself and MRG 001 is a Thanksgiving release. But his latest group sounds nothing like the introspective lo-fi folk of Thanksgiving or the mellow, soothing instrumentals of the Watery Graves, it is northwest indie-rock strewn through afro-beat arrangements. It is as if early Dirty Projectors teamed up with Nomo for an unpredictable collaboration, and it’s incredibly fun and intriguing listen.

If you are familiar with Thanksgiving, then the vocals or lyrical content will not surprise you. If you are not, they may take you a minute to get used to. The 21-year-old Orange sings in that wavering, rarely on-key indie-folk style reminiscent of Fred Thomas, Dave Longstreth, Tim Kinsella, Calvin Johnson and early Conor Oberst. It works very well as an oddball singer/songwriter, but while fronting what is essentially a stripped-down afrobeat band, it takes a minute to get comfortable hearing. Once you do though, the rewards are rampant as he has a very able seventeen-piece band reinterpreting the Lagos-derived musical style and the masterful ears of The Microphones/Mount Eerie’s Phil Elvrum and Calvin Johnson recording and engineering in the Dub Narcotic Studio. Along with the heavy Kuti influence, whose polyrhythms and horn improvisations are slowed down considerably, elements of dub, reggae, jazz, Latin and Eastern European music pop up from time to time. It is not as much of a recreation of the genre like NYC’s Antibalas or even the more exploratory Michigan outfit Nomo, but perhaps more in the vein of Johnson’s bands Beat Happening and Dub Narcotic Sound System or more current acts like the Dirty Projectors.

Even still, it is hard to completely pinpoint the sound because Orange and his band so easily transcend styles throughout the album. “Give to Love What’s Love” is the most purely afrobeat track with it’s strict polyrhythmic foundation, faintly funky guitars, horn solo, and Orange’s lesson-teaching lyrics and band leading vocals that are wonderfully mirrored in full-band choral outbursts. On the other hand, “Question Love Answer” is a dub-reggae number with jazzy inflections, “A Flower’s is Mine” sounds influenced by Ethiopian jazz, “Fire Dream” is more a pleasant chamber-jazz piece, “Unconvincing Serenade” is faintly Eastern European, and finally, “Keep Your Money” may be the most realized Thanksgiving song to date. The album is all over the place, and thanks to the talented musicianship and imaginative arrangements, it shines brilliantly.

I haven’t even touched on Orange’s lyrical imagery, which is very much a focal point for his solo project and is translated into this new setting. Like Thanksgiving albums, it is a near continuous stream of questioning and introspection, but Orange doesn’t have to solely rely on each and every lyric thanks to the exotic swirls of funk continuously circling. Adrian Orange & Her Band is a hell of a big step for the 21-year-old bandleader, and a crowning achievement of the northwest DIY music scene. It is wonderfully odd, striking, exotic and unpredictable without ever losing the region’s indie-rock ethos. Not that Portland has stagnated at all with their music scene, but this album is incredibly refreshing and definitely worth your time to check out.