LIKE MORE than three dozen other musicians, Martin Bramah and Una Baines are former members of the Fall. They left the band in 1979 to form the Blue Orchids. Combining scratchy punk noise with swirling psychedelic keyboards and abstract imagery, their first recordings sounded very angry, but about something they couldn’t quite identify. This compilation of the band’s back catalogue includes their finest moment, the 1981 single Work, on which Bramah describes the spawning habits of salmon over a backing that subverts Baines’s summer-of-love organ sprawls with needling guitar work. Tracks culled from 1982’s Agents of Change EP show a blossoming genius for arrangements, with Conscience betraying some narcoleptic spillage from a season backing the former Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico. The 1992 Out of Sight swan song is an appropriately wistful conclusion to this overdue overview.

Stewart Lee

March 03, 2002