Okay, what happened here? Youth, an electronic auteur and occasional Orb collaborator wound up working with that old vegetarian purist Sir Paul McCartney and actually produced a record worth listening to (if you're taking a hefty amount of drugs).

Rushes is the duo's second offering, and-- if I may be blunt-- the better of their two releases. Whereas 1993's dreadfully repetitive Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest seemed to drudge on indefinitely with no obvious direction, this record provides a great deal of variation while maintaining a recurrent theme (a la Pink Floyd's The Wall).

Rushes seems much more influenced by experimental electronic psychedelia than straight techno, with the album's tracks ranging anywhere from under two minutes to well over 12 minutes in length. Songs like "Palo Verde" and "7am" offer up an orchestra of new agey electronic sound effects and melodic synth drones, while "Watercolour Guitars" and "Fluid" sound like the bastard offspring of Moby and Ash Ra Tempel. "Appletree Cinnabar Amber," on the other hand, seems to draw its inspiration from Ry Cooder's bluesy electronic score to Wim Wender's 1997 art-house drama "The End Of Violence."

At any rate, these two acid- dropping Brits either put a lot more effort into Rushes than they did into Strawberries, or they just had better ideas and equipment. But ponder this-- how much better could a collaboration between John Lennon and the Orb's Dr. Alex Patterson have been? It'd have beat the shit out of Flaming Pie, that's for damn sure.

-Ryan Schreiber

"Fluid"

[Real Audio Stream]