Orange Juice
Rip it Up

THE REVIEW

Orange Juice Scottish meteors of the '80s, remembering them is just a pleasure, also thanks to a colorful Album like “Rip It Up”. James Kirk, Steven Daly, David McClymont, and the warm, unmistakable voice of Edwyn Collins who manages to bring simplicity to the choruses, maintaining the primordial charge of punk bands. And so they land with the foundation of pop-funk, white-soul, giving their best by creating a melody focused mainly on funk that covers all the tracks entirely.

Tracks like “A Million Pleading Faces”, “Turn Away”, “I Can’t Help My Self”, and “Rip It Up” are precisely and balanced in an identical graceful dance with incessantly danceable and engaging sounds, and not at all cloying. Orange Juice was a truly unique group for the quality and difficulty of the lyrics exposition and in the combination and mixture of voice with rhythm, of grace with bursting vitality. They inspired subsequent groups like Aztec Camera, Jesus and Mary Chain, Teenage Fanclub, Belle and Sebastian, and their songs have lasted until today thanks to their natural elegance and spontaneity where the transition from punk to pop was rather painless if not even pleasant and playful, to the point of ironizing by giving the group an absurd, contradictory name in the context of the circumstances, considering they were born as a punk band, and so they wanted to call themselves “Orange Juice”.

Indeed, they were a great transitional group, I hope I helped dust off some memories, also because, how could you forget such a unique voice. “Rip It Up”, even if you listen to it just once, you remember it forever.