The Greatest Hit

We Say...

Review by Douglas Wolk

Singer/guitarist Martin Bramah and organist Una Baines had both been in the Fall early on, but broke off from that group after their debut album to form the Blue Orchids. This reissue of their original incarnation's only album appends their other studio recordings (two blistering singles and an EP) and a live track with Nico from the 1981 tour on which they were her backup band and opening act.

The band's initial lifespan, roughly 1980-1982, was a dizzying, fertile period in British independent rock, when seemingly every band was trying to carve out a sound as dramatically unlike any other's as they could manage; Bramah and company had the additional weight of their association with the Fall to shake off. So the Blue Orchids played up their oddest aspects: Bramah's uncertain, "unsingerly" holler, which only occasionally hits the notes he's aiming for, and Baines' wobbly, warbly organ, the band's lead instrument, which gives these songs a tweaked garage-rock mood. (It's usually a little out of tune, too, and as vehemently as she plays, she sometimes seems to be playing an entirely different song from the rest of the group.) They take some getting used to, but once you do, it's hard to see why more bands didn't follow their example.

The Greatest Hit itself comprises the Blue Orchids' densest, knottiest material, generally rumbling along a bit more slowly than your typical post-punk band. Still, a lot of its songs — most notably "Low Profile" and "Bad Education" — reveal insidiously durable hooks on repeated listening. The band's favorite trick is to juxtapose juicy pop elements with blatantly anti-pop ideas: see, for instance, "Agents of Change," on which Bramah mumbles unrhymed abstractions to a two-note melody while Baines chimes in with angelic backing vocals and the band occasionally swerves around to an enormous chorus. And their first two singles, "The Flood" and "Work," are both knockouts, harnessing the prickly gush of punk rock to Bramah's wired, introverted spirals of language.