Orange Blossom
Album: Everything Must Change
Label: ECC100
Tracks: 10
Website: https://www.facebook.com/orangeblossomofficiel

Now I'm not normally into electropop, beat, trance or dance fusion. But I do listen out for unusual or new musics, and sometimes I have to trust to the ears of the promo agencies to alert me to something exciting that might otherwise pass me by. In this case, the heady experience that is the music of Orange Blossom, a French band whose second album, Everything Must Change, was first unleashed upon the world back in 2005, on the Bonsai label.

It can't have been easy for listeners even then, for the band's debut album had been by all accounts an almost unlistenable amalgam of nigh-unintelligible screaming German punk vocals and thrashing guitars with a violin wailing somewhere in the background. But it would appear that a massive sea-change had taken place in the seven years thereafter, for album number two saw the recruitment of French-Algerian singer Leila Bounous and percussionist Mathias, and, with a vastly increased Egyptian and Arabic influence, the transformation of the group sound into an exotic, intoxicating mix of musics from different cultures and European electrobeats.

It's an at times giddy processional that can take in West African polyrhythms and sinuous Middle-Eastern-inflected melodies as comfortably and naturally as it can absorb western rock gestures, strings and horns, and the trappings and modes of classic psychedelia.

Some tracks have a distinctly sinister ambience, while others are primarily joyous in a curiously unabandoned leftfield way. And yet others (Souffrance) could as easily be a high-grade film soundtrack. Off-the-wall it may all be at times, but it exudes a peculiar kind of unity that's quite disarming. Seriously aromatic! Cultural and musical borders are repeatedly crossed as easily as breathing. Easy to bliss out, not as easy to dismiss. It should not have been overlooked. Adventurous? Give it a try. I'm glad I did.

David Kidman