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The Blue Orchids “The Greatest Hit (Money Mountain)” (1982)

One of the more baffling oversights in the mad rampage to re-examine every last corridor of post-punk continues to be The Blue Orchids. Martin Bramah and Una Baines were founding members of The Fall, and early casualties of Mark E. Smith’s revolving-door policy. Upon their unceremonious sacking, they wasted no time putting together a new group and signing a deal with Rough Trade. There are undeniable echoes of their former band here – Una brings her trademark single-note, chinsy-keyboard melodies to the table, and Bramah has a dry, sung-spoken vocal delivery not entirely unlike that of M.E.S. From here, the Orchids struck out on their own, crafting a sound that retained some of the nervous energy and bite of The Fall while being an altogether more melodically evolved and cerebral affair.

Like The Clean and their New Zealand counterparts of the day, the Orchids were attempting to re-animate the corpse of psychedelia with a punk sensibility. While the notion seems almost quaint today, it was a fairly audacious move in the “death to hippies” climate of U.K punk. To wit, Bramah’s wry, deadpan vocals and chiming guitar lines manage to pick up on the post-Velvets art-school damage that Television and their more adventurous NYC contemporaries were forwarding. The Orchids were among the first of their scene to make a clear break with the tunnel-vision strictures of punk, with thinly-veiled drug references and honest-to-goodness “hooks”. While fellow travelers like The Soft Boys, Felt, and Josef K have all gradually re-entered the musical discussion, The Blue Orchids remain something of an “off-shoot band” footnote. All of “Money Mountain,” their debut full-length, is gripping and inventive, but one listen to “A Bad Education” should be enough to convince anyone that the Orchids were a unique entity unto themselves, and forerunners of an eccentric strain of slacker-jangle that persists in indie music to this day. —Jon Treneff

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