orbit service Songs Of Eta Carinae CD

Songs of Eta Carinae fulfills several of the promises held by Orbit Service's previous effort, Twilight. The album is darker, tighter, better written. Simply said, it hits harder in the solar plexus. Paradoxically, the group manages to push its music farther into space while putting some distance between it and Pink Floyd's, still the main reference point here. Randall Frazier's voice evokes Roger Waters, no doubt about it, and there are a few musical moments that come extremely close to the mighty Floyd, "Halos" being the main offender here -- a good song, but too derivative. Songs of Eta Carinae begins with "Wolves," a track more powerful than anything found on Twilight. Frazier is recounting a dream he had; he ends up screaming about wolves over a stark, menacing background. Pink Floyd and Radiohead (another frequent point of comparison) never had such stripped-down arrangements, and that is where Orbit Service's music becomes infectious: those precise drum beats, judicious guitar arrangements, and all-around sober instrumental developments -- a rarity in psychedelic or space rock. With its twangy lead guitar, "Bruises" almost hints at Calexico's first albums, without actually stepping out of Orbit Service's persona. Besides "Wolves," highlights include "The Truth Eludes Me," "A Hallucination," and the riveting "No Longer We Dream," in which Waters' influence resurfaces with a vengeance. This band is in a class of its own, where the more sociopathic side of Pink Floyd meets the twisted musical imagery of the Legendary Pink Dots and Edward Ka-Spel, as unlikely as it seems. Emotionally draining and highly recommended. ~ François Couture

An altruistic dark side of the moon proposition, Eta Carinae is a star 120-150 times the size of our own sun that lies a mere 7000+ light years from this island Earth. Discovered by no less than Edmond Halley his bad self in the late 17th century, Eta Carinae has been observed to fluctuate between telescopic and naked eye proportions over the past 3 centuries. Eta Carinae is in the last throes of its long life, with only about another 100,000 or so years to go before a likely supernova. It seems fitting that one of the most majestic and awesome of the celestial bodies should be serenaded by someone. Orbit Service have certainly taken space, the atom mother, to heart in this progressive ode. And like the star in their eyes the album expands and contracts from white hot to blue cool. The resultant cosmic astro-dirge howls in a bubbly flurry of electro-buzz and slowly pulsing drumbeats. Vocal whispers rise into muted wails, pushing against the very fabric of firmament itself before being drawn back into the gaseous miasma of the star-field. Violence and silence interlaced, as in the life of a sun. Or in the life of a son. The lyrics cast shadows on the stuff of terra firma and of the heart as well, making this just as much about inner space. Orbit Service's cris de coeur is a shaded psychedelic parallectrogram that almost answers the question: what if the star baby at the end of '2001: A Space Odyssey' was the product of Thom York and Roger Waters?. Orbit Service at your service. Wish you were here...

Recording information: Helmet Room Studios, Denver, CO.

Orbit Service: Randall Frazier.

Audio Mixer: Randall Frazier.