With a little help from Koze, the Moloko goddess makes summer vacation disco for the fall.
One would love to take a taxi ride with Róisín Murphy across the golden party island of Ibiza. You wouldn’t have enough room in the car because her brilliant and extravagant wardrobe would take up half the seat, you’d pop some champagne on the way to an after-party at some ugly private villa and of course listen to her new album HIT PARADE. The Moloko goddess (partially living on the party island) recorded this with the Hamburg DJ and producer Koze (a permanent guest on the same one). And that has become more than an ideal heater.
The album spirals in so housily, strays through psychedelic soul samples and erupts in a thunderstorm of bass on “Can’t Replicate”. You’ve already thrown open the window and held your head in the wind. Maybe sang along a bit. Murphy’s sixth solo album is also an interesting and contemporary dance-pop album. With mysterious speeches, with variations in the songs, with lovingly selected samples, which doesn’t correspond at all to the redneck electro prejudices that Ibiza has to endure.
Murphy says she revealed her secrets to this album
This may also be due to the fact that the two have been working on it for years, in different places. Murphy says it allowed for a more intimate approach to songwriting. She revealed her secrets to this album, which has become so joyful because she has never been happier. And Koze was not disturbed at work. You can never quite tell how happy he is, but you can clearly hear that Koze was involved in HIT PARADE. And as a second musician, not just as an order-executing service provider.
Koze’s preference for somehow strangely remote sounds, the refusal of too much harmony, is unmistakable. This urgent convolutedness can be a bit tiring at times, but it is evidence of an artistic language that is so clear, unique and fragile, like hardly any other producer of electronic music, and which creates a bulkiness whenever things get kitschy threatens. Which means that the music doesn’t come across as club-stupid, as electronic albums quickly come across.
She keeps moving towards the club
And it fits with this remoteness that Róisín Murphy still doesn’t sing any of the hymns that were written for Moloko over 20 years ago. No “Sing It Back”, no “The Time Is Now”, which are played as bad edits at all overpriced festivals. She simply hasn’t been singing hammer hooks or writing butterfly pop melodies for years. Whether she can’t or doesn’t want to, we don’t know. She just keeps moving towards the club.
And that’s okay too. This creates good songs. On HIT PARADE there are even moments in which these pleasant harmonies emerge again. The way she combines different layers of samples and vocal tracks to create great pop moments in “Fader” leads to Champus euphoria. And when her voice floats free in “Free Will,” you feel a lot lighter. The only question that arises is: Why is this summer album only released in September? Maybe because summer in Ibiza lasts a little longer.