B

Incidentally the song "Beatlesque," which is on the cd, should be a clue as to the influences on Richard's music. I think what amazes me about Richard is that he seems incapable of writing a bad song: they are all musically and lyrically intriguing and incisive, as well as deeply personal. 24 years after Zuider Zee not only is the song writing ability still there but so is the voice which, if anything, has gotten more expressive and powerful. Richard Orange is a man of exceptional musical talent and passion. Thankfully for us he has chosen to share that talent on a new cd. When you get the chance, buy a copy: you won't regret it.

years ago when Zee were playing local clubs, it was quite obvious that lead singer-guitarist Richard Orange, who has a tremendous perspective for rock and roll, was it's creative focal point. So when a new band with Orange in it began appearing recently, it was assumed that it was a situation of "Richard Orange and some backup musicians."

It was a mistaken assumption, as anyone who has seen the new band, called simply Zee, can attest.Doug May plays a finely textured lead guitar that works well in conjunction with Orange's playing, Mergen is a drummer of solid proportions, and David Mayo possesses a very rock and roll tenor voice that adds much to the band's dimension. In addition, all the members write, not just Orange.

The group plays a music that is touched with new wave phrasing yet has several other prominent roots, including Memphis soul and English Harmony. In fact, to call it a new wave is actually somewhat misleading. There is a pronounced toughness to their music (brought out particularly in the songs Orange sings), which is too gritty to have a relationship to new wave,and the music's excitement comes as much from it's dynamics as from it's suppleness.
Nevertheless there is a definite newness to what the band is doing.

With so many writers and so many diverse influences, the group's writing is surprisingly cohesive, and it is often difficult to tell which song has been written by whom. In fact, one of the band's highlights is the melding of two songs by different writers into one work.

This is a band, and Orange himself is the first to make that point.

"I never thought I'd get the opportunity again to be in a band I wanted to be in," he said. "Didn't really have any plans to. I stopped trying to do things and things started happening."

Since Zuider Zee broke up in 1976, Orange has been "doing lots and lots of demos, trying to see where I belonged - and it all led back to a group."

Zee began taking shape around February around Orange, Mergen and David mayo. Mergen had been in town only about a year. The Illinois native had been working in Chicago studios after doing some time at North Texas State University and decided it was time to get warm.
"I moved to Memphis on a complete fluke," he said. "I was sick of the Illinois winters, and I had heard of Memphis so much, And it was the first musical city south."

2005 Japanese reissue of this 2004 release, now popping on three long bonus trax(clocking in at close to 20 minutes of music!). Missed this one, before? Well, now is the time to check this one out! Many thanks to Not Lamer Bill Klutho for making sure this one was not lost on us! This is psychy display of Lennon/Harrison obsessed melody(although some songs could have walked off of both "Rock `n Roll" and "Double Fantasy" from Lennon, that good) that will remind many here of Orgone Box and Fraternal Of Order Of All in spots. Others there`s a lot of The Toms("All The Way To China" sounds like a classic Toms track!). Also, oddly enough, Mott The Hoople, XTC, Todd Rundgren and crazed Split Enz along with other disparate sounds. Richard Orange the lead vocalist for a mid-70s group called Zuider Zee(who released a wonderful pop gem on CBS around the same time), which I have feeling a small percentage of folks here recall. "Lead off track "Mental Dentist" rocks! This upbeat pop song is filled with energy, humor, melody, great songwriting, and a great performance. Richard Orange and the Eggmen have refined a great style for themselves."-GodsOfMusic.com. It`s a home-brewed affair done with plenty of flair to grab out attention. (Sidebar: Not sure if there are many Cyndi Lauper fans here, but Orange wrote the "Hole In My Heart" for Lauper and the version here is the original version of that here.) Extremely Highly Recommended!

Orange opens this killer disc with a similarly eccentric sense of humour in the helium filled, herky-quirky kick off
"Mental Dentist". It's a carzy tune with a demented backbeat, some desperate pleas to "remove this cavity inside my brain," and several giddiy squeals from Orange.

It's as if the Plimsouls and "Go 2"-era XTC collaborated just before XTC's Dukes of Stratosphere side project.
Orange is a hardend pop veteran, it should be noted. He started out his professional recording career as a youngster in the Dutch band Zuider
Zee, whose '76 album on CBS/Columbia Records nearly defined the rock critic epitaph "Beatlesque."
He's since written songs for a variety of artist, including Jane Wiedlin of "The Go Go's" and a late era Cyndi Lauper international hit, "Hole In My Heart(All the Way to China)."

This record is one he created in the legendary Sun Studios in Memphis. (See; Elvis,Johnny Cash,Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and even U2's "Rattle and Hum")

Like most out of that shop, "Big Orange Sun" is a full-bore blast of professional-grade rock 'n roll that snaps,crackles and pops throughout the whole disc,even below the surface of the ballads. His own version of the Lauper hit--here with the parentheses flipped, "All the Way to China(Hole In My Heart)--is unrelenting in its force,urgency and easily transmitted excitement. (Here's where the Peter Case likeness really rears its head. This tune sounds like "A Million Miles Away" in a much greater hurry to get there.)

An even -keeled ballad, "Fall Off the World", is loaded with Beatles sounds, from the cooing mellotron to the George Harrison slide guitar.

"Absolutely Positively" is a kickin' rockabilly romp, the kind of diversion "Dwight Twilley explored in "TV."
But Orange blast through those kinds of performances without any indication of irony--even "The Ballad of Captain Morgan" settles our initial grins into a lip-biting, thrilling "Lennonesque" experience. For the "discerning diner" hungry for a gritty but richly lush "pop and roll" gourmet feast,"Big Orange Sun" is worth every bite.

Thomas Conner
Tuls World Entertainment Writer TULSA WORLD-SAT.NOV.16. 2004

THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
Memphis, Saturday, June 24, 2000
Written by: Bill Ellis/HOT SOUNDS

The Memphis music landscape hasn't had an eccentric the likes of Richard Orange since, well, that last British-pop-inspired madman, Alex Chilton. The differences: Orange isn't concerned with being difficult, and he has Beatlemania so bad the John Lennon estate should start paying him royalties. Whether pastiche, genius or a little of both, Orange's glass-onion world will pull you in thanks to the tightly conceived melodic cornucopia of Fall Off The World, Ballard of Captain Morgan, Absolutely Positively (the best song never written by Rockpile) and All the Way To China (a1988 hit for Cyndi Lauper as hole in My Hear). That this album - played with intrepid session hotshots James Lott, Dave Smith and Pete Sulley - came out of Sun Studio is just as remarkable. (If World Party's Karl Wallinger can make a career out of Fab Four memories, why not Orange?

Arsenio Orteza Illinois Entertainer 2000

About a third of the songs on this painstakingly produced album pay an homage to the psychedelic-era Beatles so overt that some Fab Four loyalists will want Richard Orange arrested for trespassing. The trippy overdubs and doctored tapes, the orchestras and exotic instrumentation, a song actually titled "Beatlesque," the use of the last chord in "A Day in the Life" to conclude "Big Orange Sun," Orange's dead-ringer-for-McCartney voice--it's enough to give a lifelong member of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band the shivers. To hear Orange's music as a rip-off, though, especially in the age of the sample, is to miss its true antecedents: Badfinger, ELO, and XTC, groups that used The Beatles more as a starting point than an end, groups whose more obvious imitations were affectionate rather than mercenary. Besides, the album's two best songs owe nothing to the Beatles at all--the gorgeous "Fall Off The World (Mimi's Song)," a slow-dance sure-shot of cosmic proportions, and the Rickenbacker-driven "All the Way To China," an Orange composition originally recorded (and all but ruined) by Cyndi Lauper in 1988 for the soundtrack of VIBES. Meanwhile, those who marvel that an album this ornate was recorded at Memphis's Sun Studio will enjoy "Absolutely Positively," a smoking, rockabilly-rooted rave up whose title just happens to answer that most pertinent of questions, "Is this album any good?" --Arsenio Orteza Illinois Entertainer 2000
Having been at least somewhere on the scene, for no less than thirty years or so, it's strange for a Beatlemaniacal fan (which is a category I count myself in) not to have heard about Mr.Orange. Anyway, I guess it's better whenever than never, so here I am, tasting the "Orange" for the first time. Though captured on the legendary Memphis' Sun vintage studio equipment, the sound here has a rather moderndaze flavour, offering another example of an imaginary Beatles record had they continued throughout the post-1970 future. In Richard's vision, it seems that it's Paul who'd taken over most of the songwriting in the mentioned imaginary future, since there are much more Wings-alike rawk-outs, taking you into different directions like the Ska Macca-ronies of the opening "Mental Dentist", or "All the way to China (Hole in my heart)" that could've been another one of those collaborations with Costello. After some arranging adjustments "Someday darkness" could be the next smash for Oasis and there's also the one that will "Absolutely positively" take you into the smokey Cavern atmosphere. "Fall off the world (Mimi's song)" and the title tune sound as if John and Paul had actually sat down to write together in the late '60s, while "Ballad of Captain Morgan" is a popsike number "for the benefit of Mr.Lennon". At the end of the CD there's no less than 22 minutes of bonus material, made of three titles that seem like various studio sketches/outtakes of which the first one is called "Beatlesque", though the title is MUCH more suitable for the second one, "Yuppie pie / No.5".

Let's talk fruit, specifically the orange, handily orange-colored, better when it's firm and thick skinned, just like you and I. Shaped like the sun, the orange is your direct connection to vitamin C (and sticky hands). The orange comes at you in many forms: orangeade, orange candy, the pivotal ingredient in one of the greatest knock-knock jokes ever devised, and the ever-popular orange juice, killer with pulp, wussy without.

Nothing beats opening a juicy orange by splitting it slightly at the top and crow barring it open with your fingers, as fast as you can; the juice sprays all over the place and practically begs you to plant your teeth into one of the halves and suck the life out of the thing. (Try it sometime--the experience is practically orgasmic.)

All of which pretty much describes the experience of listening to Richard Orange's Big Orange Sun, a big and round and juicy kind of record that's good for you, and good to you, too. This special edition, which features three bonus tracks, is like a big, fat, extra-juicy orange that keeps on giving long after one half its size has gone down for the count.

A big, juicy Beatleoid, Orange wears his pulp on his sleeve, serving up slices of sweet pop bliss, seemingly effortlessly, but we all know that if it were that easy, we'd all be named Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr. But Orange is more than a Beatles guy; he's a fan and practitioner of catchy music, and this he doles out handily and with great pleasure.

Orange can sound like a pumped-full-of-sugar-and-salt McCartney grinding out "Monkberry Moon Delight" as if his life depended on it, as he does on the opener, "Mental Dentist," and the old time rock 'n' roll love song "Absolutely Positively," on which he manages to ape Macca's vocal technique on the first line of the verses from Press to Play's "Angry." Orange can also sound tender on the Lennonesque "Fall Off the World (Mimi's Song)," which sports a delectable chorus that really sings.

Mostly though, Orange sounds like a learned student applying acquired techniques to his art. The widescreen stereo sound is perfectly balanced, with every instrument clearly placed in its most effective position. Melody is obviously key. Every element works to service the song. Considerable thought has enabled the songwriter to translate his ideas to living sound poems able to affect listeners' senses. This is no mean feat.

Songwriters that are being true to themselves don't write for the privilege of being a cog in the hit-making machine; writing artificially must come harder than writing from the heart and soul, meaning that art created for commerce can never truly be considered art. Songwriters that can write songs from the heart and soul that become hits...well, that's quite an art in itself. The upbeat, chugging, pure pop delight "All the Way to China (Hole in My Heart)" is an example of that art; it is perfectly realized, each and every jangle well-placed, with a melody that digs as deep as the China of the title. The song was first performed by Cyndi Lauper, but Orange considers his the definitive version. I won't argue with him.

Whether Orange is spinning the tale of Captain Morgan, who was persuasive with words but couldn't put his war plans in motion ("Ballad of Captain Morgan") or waxing poetic about being steadfast ("Subterranean Sea"), he is proving his considerable musical worth. He's been paying attention to those who came before him, the Lennons and McCartneys and the like of the world; their influence is heard throughout this album, most persuasively on two of the bonus tracks: "Beatlesqe," a heartfelt display of affection for the Fabs' legacy; and "Yuppie Pie/No. 5," a "Hey Jude"-meets-"Revolution 9" tour de force that is simply mind-blowing.

As is Big Orange Sun, a hall-of-fame-worthy record that unveils new layers with each repeat listen. If Richard Orange didn't actually exist, someone would have had to invent him. Peel him right away.