507. Orange Juice - Rip It Up (1982)
















Track Listing

1. Rip It Up
2. Mud In Your Eye
3. Breakfast Time
4. Flesh Of My Flesh
5. Hokoyo
6. Million Pleading Faces
7. Turn Away
8. I Can't Help Myself
9. Louise Louise
10. Tenterhooks

Review

I kind of like this album, but it is a bit underwhelming. The band has very good credentials, the music is very pleasant and all, they are defined as post-punk but it is very much a post-punk bleeding into synth-pop and it doesn't work as spectacularly as it should.

The whole album kind of sits on a really great first track, Rip It Up, but from then it all feels slightly meh. It is never offensive or anything, it just doesn't fascinate me, it leaves me cold.

This is a band which has elements of pretty much everything, punk, synth, reggae, Nigerian music (the second track could have been Fela Kuti's)and there is a lot of potential here, but nothing that thrills, and it does seem to lose itself in its own variety. Sorry Orange Juice.

Track Highlights

1. Rip It Up
2. Breakfast Time
3. A Million Pleading Faces
4. I Can't Help Myself

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Orange Juice was a Scottish post punk band founded in the middle class Glasgow suburb of Bearsden as the Nu-Sonics in 1976. Edwyn Collins formed the Nu-Sonics (who were named after a cheap brand of guitar) with his fellow Bearsden Academy pupil, Alan Duncan, and James Kirk and Steven Daly left a band called The Machetes to join them. The band became Orange Juice in 1979. Orange Juice are perhaps best known for the hit "Rip It Up", which reached number 8 on the UK singles chart in February 1983, the band's only UK Top 40 hit.

Rip it Up: