New to Me, No. 2: Orange Goblin, Regular Blokes with Bills, Just Like You

In the best possible world, and more....

“So, we're in a really fortunate position where we basically get to go on holiday with our mates, get free booze, get paid for it, and see the world; and every night you're expected to get up on stage and play the music that you enjoy for an hour and 20 minutes or so."

"Ha, it's a hard life, hey?!"

BW: Yeah! I just wish that we were making a living by doing it...”

That last thoughtm the one about making a living as a heavy metal band came up in every interview (video or otherwise*) I read in a frantic attempt to catch up on Orange Goblin. The two words that consistently show up in the next sentence or two are “mortgages” and “families.” The same words came to mind each time I closed a browser page, or logged off for the night: “they’re regular blokes,” I’d say. (* Not totally regular: both lead singer, Ben Ward, and (I think) bassist, Martyn Millard, were apprentices for Queens Park Rangers at age 16.)

To drive home the point about Orange Goblin’s fixation with keeping ahead of finances, that quote up top came out of a 2010 interview on The Quietus (worth reading for the lede alone…but stay for the quick note on touring through Bozeman, Montana). The band swung at an honest stab of living off music too, when Ward, Millard, Chris Turner (drummer), and Joe Hoare (guitar) set off on a world tour to support the album Ward still rates as their best, 2012’s A Eulogy for the Damned. They traveled the world, “[went] on holiday with [their] mates,” (probably) got their fill of free booze…but after a year or two of touring and struggling to pull together the next album, the financials never came together. In spite of international fame – defined here as being able to fill a large-ish room with highly-interested people (this part is necessary) – the logistics and costs of touring simply don’t pencil out for a band like Orange Goblin. For what it’s worth, I do think they all miss their families too. These are very nice, responsible men, I can't stress that enough.

Noisey put out a solid retrospective about that spirited attempt around the time of the release of 2018’s The Wolf Bites Back; if you want a pretty solid one-stop snapshot of what they’re about, that feels like a good source. While circumstances forced them to downgrade Orange Goblin to a really kick-ass (hopefully lucrative) hobby, every member holds down a day job to keep home, family, and hobby together. All the same, they don’t sound anything like giving up. When TotalRock interviewed Ward at the 2017 Download Festival (link above under “video”), the way he describes the beginnings of The Wolf Bites Back – e.g., band members swapping of riffs and ideas, getting the ideas bubbling – and the fact that they got together as recently as 2017-18 to write and compose together, organically, and that everyone still keeps bringing ideas to the table, that reads like a fair sign this won't be their last album. Their last tour...well, that's another story.

And, because I brought it up elsewhere (twitter), I have to say this: what I know about heavy metal could probably only fill a novella…fuck that, a short story. Looking into, first, Gojira (you'll have to scroll down a bit), then Orange Goblin, has pointed me to two of the most stable, happy and productive bands I’ve ever encountered across any genre. Based on everything I’ve read, all the members of both bands are just the nicest, least pretentious and, to push against the meat-head head-banger stereotype I’ve carried around since the 80s, some of the smarter, more sincere and, crucially, saner musical artists I’ve ever read about. Seriously, google "Chrissie Hynde interview," and thank god you never tried to collaborate with her. (Also, watch Penelope Spheeris Decline of Western Civilization Part II, if you can find. Glam metal was…something.)

To wrap up this section, I wish the members of Orange Goblin incredible success, even wealth. I’m confident they’d put it to good use, and generally make the lives of their families, and most people around them, better (see the final paragraph of the “History” section of the band’s Wikipedia page, and run that back against all financial anxiety).

So, what about the music? I’ll start with a line from Ward I lifted out of that Noisey piece:

“We’ve ripped off so many bands that you can’t tell anymore, and as a result have created our own sound!”

That resonated strongly because, with no idea as to where to start with Orange Goblin, I started at the beginning, with their 1997 debut as Orange Goblin, Frequencies from Planet Ten (oh, if you want to know where the name Orange Goblin came from, Ward explained it in a 2012 interview with Metal Assault; and, yes, the financials came up). By about the third time I listened to the opening track, “The Astral Project” (awesome, btw), all I could hear was ZZ Top (who I don’t know well, but well enough). That gives way to “Magic Carpet,” which could become a bonus track on Steppenwolf album without anyone noticing (or just more ZZ Top). The album continues in that vein, or at least doesn’t step too far outside of it.

If I remember right, I detoured through The Big Black (2011) on my first trip toward the present of the Orange Goblin catalog, and I remember liking it, but I had to hear The Wolf Bites Back, if only to see where a band that’s been recording and releasing for 22 years wound up musically (for what it’s worth, I just put on “Quincy the Pigboy” from The Big Black at random and now I’m questioning some choices). The Wolf Bites Back opens with “Sons of Salem,” which clicked right away, and seethed with the metal sound I expect when I see a genre called “doom metal” (more later). The title track sounds like…what, to my barely-literate metal-mind would call 80s metal; it borrows from The Scorpions, all the way down to a fairly hooky/poppy pre-chorus (the bit that starts with “irrational in your belief/upholder of the law/ becomes a petty thief”). That sensibility bled away as I progressed through the album (several times): “Swords of Fire” plays with the heavier post-glam vibe that (again, working with what I have) flirts with something you’d hear on an album by The Melvins, and then they’re back to a ZZ Top riff and a mash-up of…a lot of different sounds on “Ghosts of the Primitives.” An instrumental interlude follows that starts like something you might hear on Yes (wow), but then the trebly bits kick in and…yeah, I’m stumped for a frame of reference on that one. A straight hard-core punk thrasher titled “Suicide Division” comes right after that, and then whatever “The Stranger” is wraps up the whole spirit of having fun and doing whatever the fuck they want.

I call everything I’ve heard from them “hard rock,” even if with a definite metal sensibility. As it happens, they’re most often filed under “stoner metal,” which is probably, 1) fair, and 2), based on some stray lines in a Louder Sound compilation of the 10 best “stoner metal” albums of all time, had this to say about the genre:

“…essentially ‘stoner’ defines bands who are heavily influenced by classic hard rock names from the 1970s – Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer, Neil Young, Grand Funk – all routed through a love of Cheech & Chong’s ‘up-in-smoke’ lifestyle, and an appreciation for the space rock of Hawkwind. Get the idea?”

I’ve gone on plenty, and I still haven’t addressed A Eulogy for the Damned, the album Ben Ward (in 2017) rated as the band’s best work to that point; hell, he called the title track, “Red Tide Rising” Orange Goblin’s “Ace of Spades” (found the version from The Young Ones for all you oldsters out there). That’s one hell of a metal track, and an ambitious one, lots of high-octane tempo changes, more than a little showing off, and Ward’s vocals “lean forward” at 90 mph. When I think post-80s metal – e.g., what I actually grew up on – that’s closer to the sound I expect, at least outside the death (and worse) metal scenes. And yet they’re back to a clear “stoner metal” vibe on “Stand for Something,” and the opening to “The Filthy & The Few” got me clicking back to Mudhoney’s “In & Out of Grace.”

For what it’s worth, A Eulogy for the Damned probably holds up best as the kind of album you imagine in your head when you hear something described as “metal” (e.g., “Death of Aquarias” or, slow-jam style, “Save Me from Myself”). More important than all that, Orange Goblin is one hell of a big playground, and with influences from all over the place. For instance, when Heavy Music Headquarters finally sat down with someone from the band other than Ben Ward (Millard), he answered with this when asked to listen what he was listening to at the moment:

“…old prog like Genesis and Atomic Rooster to new releases from COC, Boss Keloid and Sleep.”

For what it’s worth, I think it takes an especially resilient person to get through Sleep, and I am not that person. And, for what it’s worth, Frequencies from Planet Ten will remain my personal favorite Orange Goblin album for a while, and for the 70s sounds, aka, the sweetest of my sweet spots when it comes to rock writ large. As I’ve learned over the past couple weeks, though, I can sit through a lot of Orange Goblin. All the above feels true, and in the sense of a band that has absolutely no patience for self-mythologizing. They’re too damn busy trying to pay the bills, lad.