PETALS FROM HEAVEN

THE BLUE Orchids' debut LP has been riding high in the independent chart for weeks now. But it's not belated amend-making when I say it's one of the best albums we're likely to hear all year.

Paul Tickell described Judy Nylon's Pal Judy' as an elliptical, more intimate relative of Grace Jones' 'Nightclubbing'. This is much more true of 'TheGreatest Hit' and Echo and the Bunnymen's classic 'Heaven Up Here'.

For example, musically the Orchids' 'Bad Education' strongly resembles the Bunnymen's 'A Promise'. But whereas 'A Promise' is a vivid, highly-charged epic, reaching a climax of release and fulfilment, 'Bad Education' is tentative and personal, striving in vain for resolution but achieving the delicacy of a watercolour - understated but more haunting than the Bunnymen's full-blown spectacular.

The music perfectly frames and complements the lyrics - and this is an album with a message (lyric sheet enclosed). No beady rhetoric, but songs of romantic, melancholy yearning for Pure Feeling, Transcendental Oneness, atc. But this mysticism only tumbles into unintelligibility on the last number, W. B. Yeats 'Mad as the Mist and Snow', set to a tune reminiscent of the folk source that inspired 'Stairway to Heaven'.

But otherwise the songs are consistently dreamllke and resonant, sung with a wistful, languid intensity by Martin Bramah, whose dour vocal inflections occasionally echo his one-time boss Mark Smith. That apart, only a certain inspired looseness and unfussy production remind me of The Fall. Other influences are more apparent.

The fragile sweetness of the Velvet Underground - 'Pale Blue Eyes', not 'Sister Ray' - pervades throughout, and that dreary old Doors tag is not inappropriate. Check out 'A Year With No Head' for unaduiterated Manzarek-Kriegerisms by Bramah and Una Baines.

But this is not to diminish the Blue Orchids' achievement. which is all the greater because so often unsuccessfully attempted. They are making music which is introspective yet - exhilarating, sad but stirring.

Mat Snow

New MusicaI Express 10th July, 1982