The album
thrives in the spaces where Orbital strikes a balance between, rather than
starkly juxtaposes, disparate tempos and textures. When the slinky “Buried Deep
Within” kicks into a thrumming rave pulse midway through, it feels like a
natural progression of the cosmic soundscapes that opened the track. The
Hartnolls also work skillfully with more jagged patterns, as on the sublimely
hypnotic “Tiny Foldable Cities,” as stabs of high-pitched keys converge with a
throbbing low end on a densely layered track where all the moving parts
complement rather than work against each other.
While
Orbital has, through the years, frequently embellished their largely
instrumental music with guest vocalists, from Alison Goldfrapp to Zola Jesus,
the only featured guest on Monsters Exist is physicist Dr. Brian Cox. With an
entire track devoted to a spoken-word piece that’s part cosmology lecture, part
conservationist TED Talk, he offers a bleak kind of optimism in the notion that
our individual atoms achieve a sort of “limited immortality” by living on
through the “the great cycle of stellar death and rebirth.” As the album’s
final track, such a grandiose closing statement comes off like a forced
exercise in high-minded escapism. It’s another jarring turn on an album
otherwise content to simply mirror, rather than elaborate on, the muddled,
schizophrenic energy of an increasingly disconnected world.
