- The High Queen of the Irish dance floor is back and this time she’s brought a big machine to give your hips, knees, feet and toes a good working over. Been a bit of a gap since her 2016 Take Her Up To Monto album, with only a few singles over the last couple of years marking her progress in the studio. However, her at times sultry, other times worn, gravelly tones find a good home amongst the beats of a lonely dance floor (because 2020’s dance floors have all been bereft and lonely.)
Murphy has pulled together a full release with some new and unheard material and reached back as far as 2012 with the album’s opener Simulation which was then a club released 12”-er. Now it has pride of place leading off her most “disco” release since her days with former partner Mark Brydon in Moloko. Simulation steams in after a sample of spoken dialogue punching hard and updates the 2012 sound to something that isn’t out of place in 2020.
The entire work has been produced to flow easily from one track to the other, taking you from some heavy dance-floor material into smoky back rooms for a D&M session, all thanks to the equal collaboration Murphy has minted with Sheffield producer Richard Barratt (aka DJ Parrot and Crooked Man). Listen to how cleverly crafted the middle third of the album flows from the pop-ish Selfish Mademoiselle to Incapable, with all the groovy bass guitar licks and thought-provoking lyrics hanging off some of Murphy’s best vocal work on the album, and then the deep throb of a bass line and repetitive (but never boring) keyboard chord progressions and lyrics chanting We Got Together.
The previously released Murphy’s Law is very Nile Rodgers throughout and brings back Murphy’s Moloko style of singing, at times breathy, then drops down to a deeper register to colour the verse in the way the great women of colour disco divas handled their material in the 1970s. Naturally only an artist as ready to tinker with her style as Murphy would dare to record a song called Game Changer and not have it sound naff. The hovering synth chord that stays behind and over the lyrics is mesmerising and Murphy switches from some rapid delivery of lines back to something more conventional, vocally.
Another of her 2019 releases, the disco-theatrical Narcissus has more of that hypnotic bass beat, calling you from your seat into the middle of the floor. Throw in something sounding like Walter Murphy’s Big Apple Band and their 1976 hit A Fifth of Beethoven with the full sound of strings and that beat, you have a winner. Bringing the Machine to a stop is one more throwback to the early days of the decade, Jealousy from 2013. If Narcissus was disco-theatrical, then Jealousy is uber-disco-theatrical. Starting with a shrieking cri de cœur this track is almost more Chic than Chic themselves.
This year's hard ban on clubs and dancing is like a plot mash-up of Footloose and Dirty Dancing and, like Kevin Bacon to the rescue, thank God that dance-floor specialist artists are still giving it a red-hot go and flinging out something to give people, at least, an “at-home-disco” experience. It is the very minimum medicine we need to cure the cray-cray days of 2020. Murphy seems right at home in her well-crafted disco and the Machine will be revved up and purring in a ready to go fashion when the club doors reopen and the mirror ball starts spinning again.
- Blair Martin.