Bicycles & Tricycles

Bicycles & Tricycles is the sixth studio album from The Orb. It brought together The Orb’s style of the early 1990s with current electronic music to mixed reactions. The Daily Telegraph praised Bicycles & Tricycles as being “inclusive, exploratory, and an enjoyable journey”; however, many other publications dismissed it as “stoner dub” and largely irrelevant to current electronic music culture. In addition to Paterson, Roome, Phillips, and Fehlmann, The Corpral contributed with vocoder affected singing and MC Soom-T provided lyrics and rapped. Though most critics found the rapping to be out of place, Jive Magazine described it as “the best track on ” and “an amazing hip hop trip”. Orb co-founder Jimmy Cauty, too, made a guest appearance as co-writer on Bicycles & Tricycles’ “From a Distance”. After departing from Island Records, The Orb released Bicycles & Tricycles in 2004 on Cooking Vinyl in the United Kingdom and Sanctuary Records in the United States. To promote the album, The Orb began a UK tour with dub reggae artist Mad Professor, who had remixed The Orb in the past. Though The Orb still pulled in large crowds, The Guardian described one London performance as “joyless” and stated that “few of the new tracks… really go anywhere”.