ORANGE SUNSHINE (Homo Erectus) LP/CD:
It was like discovering one of this obscure late-60's heavy rock bands, when I listened for the first time to ORANGE SUNSHINE. A friend of mine had bought the vinyl-edition, and when he put the needle in the groove, I was blown away by the raw heaviness of this power-trio. At least, there was this outstanding cover-artwork, showing the band on the top of an old German tank and all that in 3-D! The singing drummer looks like Jesus, while the bassplayer is wearing a helmet of the German Wehrmacht. Of course, he and the cool-looking guitarist are wearing black sunglasses, too! On the back of the album-cover, I found the year of release: 1969. Well, the illusion was perfect! Some weeks later I found out, that this date was just a fake, but my opinion about ORANGE SUNSHINE remains the same: fucking brilliant! It's real amazing, how authentic this band has captured the spirit of early Blue Cheer and early Stooges. But that's not all here! They drenched this nasty bastard in a bath of hardest boogie and rock 'n' roll and injected a bit of Motor City Blues in it. I guess, you can imagine that "Home Erectus" sounds as vintage as possible, without being old-fashioned. It's an explosive record that's potent enough to blast your ass to kingdom come. While the first edition of the album has been released via Motorwolf Records, this is the Japanese 2005 edition on Leaf Hound Records, and the first 500 copies comes with shaped 3-D glasses. At least, I like to add that I've seen  ORANGE SUNSHINE on this year's 10th Roadburn Festival, and it was one of best rock 'n' roll shows in my life! I'm startin' to sweat, when I remember this loud and nasty gig.....

(KK) www.leafhound.com

Orange Sunshine is a relatively new band from Netherlands but their sound is proudly anything but new. Taking their cues mainly from Blue Cheer, Stooges and MC5 along with a quirky dash of psychedelia and a production that is as 70’s as it’s (jokingly) said on the back cover, Orange Sunshine smoke when they hit their stride.
If the world was any fair “Lonely Child”, album’s opener, would have been all over the radio by now. Well you’ve guessed it; world is, despite all the war mongering, far from heavens (makes you wonder doesn’t it??) but then again this song is just so damn memorable that will certainly make heads turn then twist before banging in unison. Elsewhere, “I’m a Man” is a classic R&B tune with nice touches of harp but doesn’t score highly on the novelty rate (partly as it stands as a Bo Diddley tribute). “Ain’t No Way” that follows straight after demonstrates again all the strong assets of the band. Nervous pace, dirty fuzzy guitar, vibrating bass, all wrapped under a voice that actually knows how to sing. “Gorilla” spring to mind as a more contemporary reference to Orange Sunshine ditties. The album gloriously closes with “Hey Mama”, which clocks fifteen minutes along with a psyched out drum solo and has “Cream” whipped all over it.
Overall this is a highly energetic album with loads of nice turns that will effortlessly nest on your player for a long time. I bet that the next one will be a pure stomper, as long as they don’t harness their sound on the way that is and fully catch their sound niche.
www.motorwolf.nl



Orange Sunshine - Homo Erectus (Leafhound) Review By Steve Williams
Now, I have always been a fan of 60¹s Garage psychedelia. Bands such as Cream, The Sonics, Iron Butterfly, The Stooges and MC5 to name a mere handful, were champions of a music, years ahead of its time utilising the limitations of recording quality to enhance the raw energy of their performances. Even though the music sounded tinny and rough, the excellence shone through. The fusion of blues, jazz and rock & roll exploding into a high octane explosion of a new exciting form of heavy rock which set the template for all rock music that followed. The foundations of rock history had been laid.
Now forty years later we have been blessed with many bands that have carried the torch and remained faithful to the energy passed from generation to generation. Such a band is not Orange Sunshine. This thoroughly irritating three piece from The Netherlands not only take the foundations of rock and piss on it, they have the audacity to recreate a bogus history claiming they were around in 1969 and this album is some masterpiece dug out of some rock archive, at least that is the gist I get from the Dutch liner notes.
A terrible Frankensteinesque experiment in Lo-Fi, detuning and feedback, Orange Sunshine try to sound like the bands I mentioned above but instead of improvised blues jams emerging from rigid musical standards we get cheese grater guitar solos, bee in a cup drums, virtually silent bass and plagiarised blues lyrics.
No effort has been made in learning how to play and there doesn¹t seem to be any connection between the musicians except that they all probably think the trick to making great music is to get disgustingly stoned first. I could give you a track-by-track review but believe me there is no point, each song is like dying warthogs farting on out of tune guitars and bin lid cymbals with a drunken regurgitating elephant singing old John lee Hooker tunes. The only stand out track for me is track seven ³Cause I¹m Your Man² because on the three occasions of which I have forced myself to listen to this talentless bilge I have not managed to make it past the first three minutes of this six minute epic of crap without turning it off, taking it out my car CD player and forcing myself to not throw it out of the window.
If you have the misfortunate to have someone play this codswallop at you proclaiming words like retro and tribute smack them in the face and play some Kyuss instead. www.leafhound.com




Orange Sunshine presents 'Al Naafiysh' (The Soul):
In search of THE TONE, a proto-doom 'Randy Holden meets the Swans' hard-rock mantra, primitive hi-volume motor blues to evocate the soul and the pain.
one long dark ride (a ritual death trip?) to enlightenment? Hear the loudness (AUM PADME HUM) and feel your body, a slow heavyness of the load! A biologic experiment to try to render the rumble of the trembling earth's explosive ground tone as one can worship in total surrender the roaring SUNN 0))) amplifiers, the howling and growling guitars and the totalitarian whiplash of the drums. And when the air turns into french cheese, your futile ego could very well be absorbed and dissolved by the menacing vortex of the encroaching usurpator from the abyss of the reptilian brain, a swelling angry flood of atavistic emotions. Pray in an hallucinating trance, for all the universe is but one wavelength, one number, one sound: an eternally pulsating flow of energy, PANTA RHEI!

http://www.metalfan.nl/
"...Keiharde psychedelische bluesrock in acht tracks waarbij je niet stil kunt blijven zitten. Simpel, puur en compromisloos. Origineel misschien niet, maar wel extreem goed. Alles aan dit album klopt als een bus; schreeuwende gitaren en ruwe zang van Guy Tavares die tegelijkertijd ook de drumstokken beheert. Elk nummer zo goed als het voorgaande...."

ORANGE SUNSHINE  - "HOMO ERECTUS"
Leafhoud Records / Motorwolf
Forget the host of retro-rock bands wandering about in their paisley shirts and bellbottom jeans, Orange Sunshine has the real LSD-driven, late 60's sounds and man do they rip! It's actually hard to believe, but Orange Sunshine isn't a powerhouse trio from the late 60's, and their debut album called "Homo Erectus" wasn't presumed lost until a miraculous unearthing and subsequent release by Leafhoud Records. Orange Sunshine was conceived in a squat in Holland just a couple of years ago, although the band can easily pass as a very sought after relic from another era. They play a heady, explosive, fuzzed-out mix of garage-acid-punk and proto hard rock with Detroit-rock simplicity and the very soul of amphetamine driven blues. There aren't any gimmicks, just three guys and a whole pile of killer riffs (influenced by the likes of Blue Cheer, MC5 & Stackwaddy). Not to diminish all the other solid bands in the forefront of retro-rock, but Orange Sunshine absolutely rip, genuinely sounding like something from another time, and like today, it was a time when the world was in turmoil.

Orange Sunshine - Homo Erectus
(Motorwolf / Clearspot)
Op 10-jarige leeftijd was ik al wars van trends en hip doen. Ik dronk ranja <http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranja> , terwijl cola en sinas in waren. Ik ging mijn eigen weg die weinig populariteit opleverde. Ik blijk niet alleen geweest te zijn, want ook de jongens van Oranje Sunshine <http://www.orangesunshine.tk/>  hebben een psychedelisch ranja-verleden. Gezellig met elkaar buitenspelen en dan bij mamma een slokje achteroverslaan. En als het regende dan werd er stiekem naar de platen van pappa luisteren: Blue Cheer <http://www.bluecheer.info/> , Led Zeppelin <http://www.ledzeppelin.com/informant.html> , Rory Gallagher <http://www.rorygallagher.com/>  en Cream <http://www.jackbruce.com/cream/> . Met op de schoot al die boeken en tijdschriften over Amerikaanse rocklegendes waar pappa ook zo van hield. De klasgenoten mochten dit uiteraard niet weten. Het mooiste cadeau was een gitaar, orgel of drumstel van pa en ma. Zij begrepen het. Het was wel h ard oefenen om de instrumenten onder de knie te krijgen, maar na jaren bloed, zweet, tranen en ranja was het tijd voor verdere stappen in het land van seks, drugs en rock 'n' roll. Seks en de meisjes waren echter bij mamma uit den boze, de drugs was de ranja en rock 'n' roll kwam uit de collectie van pappa. Toch werd er een label gevonden en zo is er dan deze cd -release van Homo Erectus met bonustracks van de reeds in 2001 verschenen lp die ooit baanbrekend zou zijn geweest. Nu is het muziek voor grijze mannen die jeugdherinneringen willen ophalen, voor rockers van nu die wars zijn van trends en hip doen of voor hen die de nieuwste sensatie niet willen missen. Live schijnt het namelijk behoorlijk heftig aan toe te gaan.

ORANGE SUNSHINE : "Homo Erectus" (Motorwolf Records/Clearspot)
If I didn't know better, I could believe that this was a forgotten release from the era when bands like Jimi Hendrix, Blue Cheer, Free and MC5 were big news, this could easily have been recorded back in 1967, and no-one would have known the difference in the first place.

The album gets off to a roaring start with "Hush, hush", with a solid up-tempo drum beat and fuzzed up blues guitars, there's more than a hint of Blue Cheer & Groundhogs style 60's rock'n'roll. Nevermind that "Catfish" does sound a lot like Taste. Even the chorus, with the phrase "I am just a catfish alone in the sea" is Rory Gallagher all over again. "Girl, youŠ" is one hell of a track, starting with an riff that bears an uncanny resemblence to "You really got me" of The Kinks. The music is very free spirited, and goes well with any illicit substance, especially a huge joint or a cold brew, though their bandname is derived from one type of acid which was particularly popular among American ground forces in Vietnam.

"Homo erectus" is an excellent fun album by a Dutch power blues/rock trio, and as long as you don't approach it expecting any huge surprises or revalations, fans of the genre will find a lot to enjoy here, and there's enough on show to expect that Orange Sunshine will be more than capable of following it up.