The first thing you hear on Róisín Murphy’s fifth album is a snatch of spoken word, an extract from a monologue that appears in full later. “I feel my story is still untold,” she says, “but I’ll make my own happy ending.”
Murphy’s fans may concur with the sentiment. It’s an article of faith among them that the former Moloko frontwoman should be more famous than she is: look online and the word “underrated” seems to attach itself to her like a nickname. Watching the footage of her performing her former band’s 2003 single Forever More at Glastonbury, or the videos she posted from her living room during lockdown, you can see what they mean. The former offers eight minutes during which Murphy manages to sport four different, preposterous headdresses and execute a mid-song costume change from late-80s raver in puffa jacket, beanie and KLF T-shirt into a glamorous red dress and feather boa. The latter’s high point might well come during a rendition of Murphy’s Law, a single from Róisín Machine, that also involves several changes of headdress: high-kicking around her coffee table, she falls flat on her arse, rectifying herself with a defiant bellow of “I’m alright!” You watch them and think, yes, the charts probably would be a more interesting place if, say, Dermot Kennedy or James Arthur made way for Murphy.
It’s a view bolstered when she makes an album as well turned-out as Róisín Machine – a collaboration with Sheffield producer Richard Barratt, whose career stretches back to Funky Worm’s early UK house hit Hustle to the Music, takes in the pioneering bleep techno of Sweet Exorcist’s Testone and sample-heavy 90s hitmakers All Seeing I, and who has spent the last few years releasing a string of fantastic house tracks and remixes as Crooked Man. There are tracks on Róisín Machine that correspond to Crooked Man’s recent output – not least Game Changer, the rhythm of which mirrors the experiments with 6/8 time signatures on his 2018 album Crooked House – but the pair have been collaborating on and off for years (some of Róisín Machine first saw the light of day on 12-inch singles in 2012 and 2015).
Theirs is a pleasingly symbiotic relationship. The pair have minted a great, idiosyncratic take on disco-house, a genre overstuffed with workmanlike tracks. There’s a freshness and a sparkle to Narcissus’s high-drama explosions of strings and Jealousy’s frantic Chic-y groove. Kingdom of Ends, meanwhile, is a song about frustration, a theme that seems to run through Róisín Machine, the lyrics usually vague enough to make you wonder if the songs’ protagonists are singing about romantic failure, the current state of Britain, or indeed the career frustrations Murphy has articulated herself: “Why do you have to make me wait? I’m already bored of my fate.” It’s also a theme mirrored perfectly in the sound of Kingdom of Ends. An unrelenting six-note bass riff keeps rising in intensity; there comes a point, three minutes in, where you become absolutely convinced a huge drop, or a dancefloor-energising kick drum is about to arrive, but the climax never comes and the bass line recedes.
However long and intermittent the process behind making it, Róisín Machine is a sharper, more focused album than 2016’s Take Her Up to Monto; one which reins in some, but not all, of its author’s eccentricities: she’s still more than capable of a weirdly striking lyric (“how dare you sentence me to a life without dancing when I’m already lost in the groove?”) and of a camply theatrical vocal performance, as on Jealousy’s opening bellow of its title. Certainly, it allows Murphy’s talents to shine far more clearly than its sprawling predecessor. There’s her keen pop sensibility, which fuels Shellfish Mademoiselle and Murphy’s Law, fabulous songs both, and her innate understanding of dance music, which extends to occasionally taking a back seat. There’s something perversely bold about opening a solo album with a track on which the lead artist’s contribution is as subtle as Murphy’s on Simulation: her vocal is pared down to a few lines and some breathy, Donna Summer-ish ad-libs, always in service to the compelling deep house backing.
Róisín Machine is as good an album as Murphy has made: like 2007’s Overpowered or 2015’s Hairless Toys, it makes her position on the margins of pop seem curious. But in between making albums like this, Murphy has shown an impressive determination to wander down whatever path she chooses without any thought to commercial considerations: after Overpowered went gold, she didn’t release another album for eight years; she’s put out collections of songs in Italian, a language she doesn’t actually speak, off-beam singles on her own label and limited edition 12-inches with house producer Maurice Fulton retailing at 20 quid a pop. It’s a body of work that suggests an artist successful enough to do whatever she wants: making her own happy ending, as Róisín Machine’s monologue puts it.
This week Alexis listened to
A Swayze and the Ghosts: Paid Salvation
Because sometimes what you really need is just righteously pissed-off, yobby Australian punk rock.
