Stylistically, Odyshape was a radical departure from the band's first album, featuring a diverse range of instruments, such as the shruti box, balophone, shehnai and kalimba,[2] which they picked up at junk shops and markets[3] or brought back from New York after their 1980 tour.[1] The band incorporated influences from ethnic field recordings and musicians such as Ornette Coleman, and often swapped instrumental roles to freshen the arrangements.[3]
Odyshape was recorded after Palmolive, the band's original drummer, had left the group, leaving the band to write without a drummer in mind; later the Raincoats hired Richard Dudanski (P.I.L.), Charles Hayward (This Heat) and Robert Wyatt (Soft Machine) to contribute percussion parts. Palmolive's original replacement, Ingrid Weiss, left during the start of the recording of Odyshape.
The album cover was based on the painting Peasant Woman by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich.[4]
Pitchfork reviewer Nick Neyland said, "This album has little in common with anything else around at the time, other than the feeling that you're hurtling relentlessly forward into a previously unmapped musical space... It's a very intimate recording, full of sounds they wisely never tried to recreate again, and vocal takes that are often inflected with a heart-crushing vulnerability."[7] Critic Simon Reynolds called it "postpunk that's been totally unrocked."[3]
BBC Music writer Chris Power said, "More than the exotic instrumentation, though, it's the extraordinary structures of Odyshape's songs that distinguish it. They don't so much begin and end as ebb and flow in a way that, historically, seems to have bewildered at least as many listeners as it's beguiled."[2] Noel Gardner of Drowned in Sound described the "new instruments" as essential to the recordings, noting that "you'd never call any of it 'prog', really, but the spirit of the commie beardos that comprised the Seventies Canterbury scene is being carried here nevertheless."[1]
