ARTiST: The Orange Lights
TiTLE: Life Is Still Beautful
LABEL: Blackbird Recordings
GENRE: Indie
TiME: 46:06 min
SiZE: 64,4 MB
BiTRATE: VBRkbps
RiP DATE: Aug-14-2007
RELEASE DATE: 00-00-2007
WEBSiTE: www.myspace.com/theorangelights
Track List:
01. Let The Love Back In 05:07
02. Sleepwalking 05:22
03. Whats Missing In Your Life 04:28
04. Life Is Still Beautiful 04:06
05. The Explanation 04:41
06. A Few Good Days 04:24
07. Balloons 04:10
08. Little Me Little You 04:54
09. Click Your Heels 04:39
10. My Guardian Angel 04:15
Release Notes:
Music comes from many different places. Some of it
comes from happy accidents; a lot of it comes from
the programmed, laboratory environment of a hit
factory. Very occasionally, great pop music comes
from somewhere deeper within the soul. So it is with
The Orange Lights. Their epic, widescreen guitar
soul has melodies that scare the sky and words that
come laden with meaning and tug at the heartstrings.
One listen and there's every chance you'll be
hooked. This was definitely the case for fabled
Coldplay producer Ken Nelson, who ignored the pile
of lucrative offers from major artists and chose
instead to work with The Orange Lights when they
were still unsigned. Nelson felt - and responded to
- the band's music and their passion. It was a
similar case for Richard Ashcroft producer Chris
Potter, who worked on the album initially, and Chris
Lord-Alge, the LA-based award-winning mix engineer
who polished the record with his trademark 3D sound.
It's been a similar tale as the band have begun
making live appearances: blowing people away as far
apart (geographically and spiritually) as Newcastle,
Los Angeles (where they appeared at Musexpo, LA's In
The City) and Ibiza (Ibiza Rocks supporting the
Editors, and broadcast on Channel 4). When the band
performed acoustically in front of the BPI / The
Brits committee at an industry gathering at The
Staples Center in LA, Steve Redmond stated: "I was
knocked out. Four out-of-the-box radio records".
America seems to love them too: the band have
stacked up 56 plays on Indie 103 in Los Angeles, and
17 plays to date on KCRW - the two most influential
radio stations on the West Coast - before even
releasing a record! And now Nic Harcourt is
championing the band on his hugely influential
Morning Becomes Eclectic show with strong support of
Let The Love Back In.
In one sense, The Orange Lights are the vehicle for
the enormous, emotional vocal chords of Jason
("Jay") Hart - a deceptively quiet, unassuming man
with a big, big voice. Which makes it quite ironic
that his previous claim to fame was as a touring
guitarist - in Jason Pierce's Spiritualized. Jay
hasn't quite put the guitar down - he still plays in
The Orange Lights - but is mostly concentrating on
his vocals. Still, it's unsurprising that The Orange
Lights have been compared to - along with New Order
and Primal Scream circa Damaged - "a mainstream
Spiritualized."
Co-creator of The Orange Lights is Newcastle-based
songwriter Paul Tucker, who had had considerable
past success but was at a loose end when he came
across Nottingham-born Jay after a mate gave him a
CD. At the time he'd just been looking for a guitar
player, but was struck not just by Jay's distinctive
fretwork, but that voice. It sounded then as it
still sounds now: wounded, fragile but powerful,
soulful. "I was blown away, transported," says Paul.
"There was this huge landscape of guitar... and
somebody singing. I just had to meet this guy." Even
now, Paul is in raptures as he tries to describe
what it felt like when he heard that voice for the
first time. "It was very warm... but there was
something almost ghostly about it."
They met and bonded over music, as mates do -
spending a lot of time playing each other differing
influences from old soul to Echo And the Bunnymen,
and all points in between. In fact, if there is an
Orange Lights sound it's the collision between soul
and indie or alternative guitar music. "In many ways
we're a soul-rock band,' muses Paul, who in a
previous musical life penned most of soulsters the
Lighthouse Family's biggest hits. There's also
something different and nagging about the music:
it's hugely positive, but post-traumatic: songs
which sound like they're trying to find something
good after something horrendous. Which, it turns
out, is exactly how they came about.
Three years ago, a family tragedy led Paul to
experience what he calls "My own personal 9/11. I
think the band's music was defined by that," he
says, quietly, telling of a "big black cloud" that
followed him around for the best part of two years.
One night, he sat at the piano and wrote the first
of The Orange Lights' trademark songs. "I thought
about what had happened and Life Is Still Beautiful
came out of my fingers in about 10 minutes," he
says. "It was probably the quickest thing I've ever
written. It just flooded out.
Jay was the perfect person to sing it, because at
the time he was going through a similarly traumatic
period involving someone he was very close to. "The
synchronicity was uncanny," he admits of the way
Paul would write words that seemed eerily
appropriate to him. "We'd go in there [Paul's
Tyneside rehearsal room and recording studio The
Beach] and the pair of us were in bits. You can hear
it, the processes we went through." Indeed. There
were moments, Jay admits, when they were too bound
up in trauma to write anything in the studio.
However, usually, explosions of feelings manifested
themselves in uplifting music. Sometimes, only
afterwards they realised just how much of what Paul
calls the "dark stuff" had found its way into song.
When Jay recruited Chris Gittins (bass) and Alex
Lucas (drums) - mates he'd known and played with on
and off for years - The Orange Lights became a band.
Paul and Jay then saw guitarist Ewan Warden playing
with London band Grand National and was blown away.
Together, they talked about what they wanted
soundwise and all agreed that it should be
widescreen, symphonic, like a "sound pressure wave."
The band adopted the unusual strategy of approaching
producers rather than record companies, and were
amazed when one of their favourite sound shapers -
Ken Nelson, whose work they'd loved with Kings Of
Convenience and early Coldplay. Coldplay's X & Y
album was erupting just as the unsigned band's demo
landed on the table. Out of the blue, the band
received a message saying Ken Nelson wanted to meet
them. He travelled up to Newcastle, listened to a
"very rough" demo of the achingly personal My
Guardian Angel - and simply nodded his head. All
went quiet for three weeks before he suddenly phoned
up saying he'd love to do it. It was a similar tale
with Chris Potter, best known for his work on the
Verve's truckload-selling Urban Hymns - who has
produced no less than seven Orange Lights tracks.
Both producers have captured The Orange Lights as
they sound during their well-received live
performances: emotional, raw, epic; in your face.
Some personal situations are ongoing, but they've
clambered from the wreckage with great songs, driven
skyward by the sheer force of Jay's soul and golden
voicebox. "When you get a tune together and the
hairs on the back of your arms stand up, you know
you've got to carry on," he smiles, quietly. "I
think it is something special, because it's come
from a genuine place."