Orbit Service (Randall Frazier, Matt Mensch, Michael Morris, and Jeff Morris) nominally hails from Denver, Colorado, but on Songs from Eta Carinae, they seem to spend more time in a nominally recognizable abstract world hovering in space than tethered to any particular locality. Songs of Eta Carinae starts with the interpersonal alienation and self-destructive tendencies of Roger Waters era Pink Floyd and bends it through the lens of Radiohead’s twin towers of suburban angst and numbing conformity. Throw in the gothic ambience championed by Bauhaus and fellow Denver natives, the sadly defunct 16 Horsepower and you’re starting to get the picture. There are the omnipresent dark shadowy forces at work early on in the background sucking you into their clutches (“Wolves”, and “Show of Hands”). Eventually, “Us and Them” becomes “Me vs. You” (“A Hallucination”) as the larger oppressive conflict is recast in more intimate and personal terms. The natural order disintegrates and inverts as the sky splinters and water runs uphill (“Asphyxia”). Throughout, Frazier’s lyrics have a vaguely menacing tone though their cryptic content keeps them from becoming viscerally threatening and this ambiguity leaves much of the album open to interpretation, which is likely the intent. The musical soundtrack to these lyrical examinations charts their expansions and contractions of mood swing and power shifts. There is little doubt that Orbit Service has nailed the format, but however tried and true the formula, the Pink Floyd / Radiohead legacy can be cumbersome. Songs' best moments come when Orbit Service gets past the first few songs and starts to logically extend the vectors begun by their progenitors. This is evident in the exquisitely delicate and intimate claustrophobia of “Asphyxia”, whose constricted funhouse mirror drum and bass and haunting melodica make it the record’s standout, or the steadfast refusal to surrender to lies of “The Truth Eludes Me.”
As mentioned earlier, the flow of this disc is all about expansion and contraction. I find Orbit Service defter in their characterization of contraction. For me, the suffocating oppression of “Asphyxia” or even the madhouse white hot coda of “Bruises” is much more beautifully realized than the more expansive sprawl of “Show Of Hands.” The music on Songs is perfectly pitched for both of these extremes so a lot of my preference comes down to Frazier’s voice. In the softer moments when he brings things down to a whisper, it’s a powerful tool but when he ups the volume and cries out it sounds much less distinctive (imagine equal parts Perry Farrell, Thom Yorke, Peter Murphy, and even sometimes with an edge of Bono). Which is not to say all listeners are going to have the same reaction, I just find myself losing interest when the voice gravitates to those better known roads. At its heart, this is progressive rock, folks. So, if you’ve not got the stomach for BIG topics and an expansive scope, then leave this one alone. But if you hunger for music that is not afraid to stretch itself a bit in pursuit of a grand story, or seek out bands that are not afraid to follow their own muse, then Orbit Service should feed your Jones pretty nicely.
