FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Róisín Murphy - Róisín Machine
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AS a big fan…
of Róisín Murphy, I was excited when her fifth studio album, Róisín Machine, came out on 2nd October, 2020. Another stunning album from the Arklow-born artist, it is one I am keen to revisit. The point of this feature is to look back at albums from the past five years that were received well at the time but, perhaps, need a bit more love and exposure now. An album that had begun life a decade before its release, it was the return of Damian Harris to Skint Records as creative director in 2019 that helped get things moving. Murphy actually signed a contract with Skint Records and its parent label, BMG. This is a one-album deal as, in her words, Murphy wants to leave options open. Who is to say what she’ll produce for her next album?! Featuring blends of Disco, House and Dance, it is a bit of a departure from previous work. The distinct pen and vocal of Murphy are at the forefront, through the textures and compositions are different to, say, 2016’s Take Her Up to Monto (that album has more Electropop and Dance-Pop elements). I am going to come to a couple of huge reviews for Róisín Machine that make an argument for this album being cherished and spun a lot more today. Over the past few years, there has been this fascinating Disco revival. Albums from Jessie Ware, Kylie Minogue and Dua Lipa has taken the genre to original places and brought it to new audiences. Mixing Pop, Electro and other sounds, I hope that we continue to hear the impact of Disco on modern artists. Róisín Machine, let’s hope, gets a follow-up from Murphy.
I wonder whether she will explore Disco more on her next album (if, indeed, there is going to be another album from her). She was involved in a fair few interviews in 2020/2021 to promote the album. There are a couple I wanted to highlight. In this chat with Official Charts, Murphy was asked about Róisín Machine and the fact it fitted in with the current and blossoming Disco revival scene:
“What made you decide to sign with a larger label for this record?
“It was all Damian really. He’s probably the best A&R person I’ve ever worked with. BMG also have my publishing, so they’re probably quite interested in solidifying my legacy, and so am I, as it goes. It’s only for the one album - they wanted to sign me for more and I had to play a bit of hard ball and I wanted to keep my options open. It would take me quite a lot to get me away from them now, they’re so nice.
It’s hard to put out a record independently now – people expect a regular flow of content and you sort of have to play the game if you stand a chance of cutting through the noise.
That’s where the machine comes in. The Roisin Machine is in full effect on those levels because I do all the directing and the visuals. I have a very prolific output with or without being on a major label, which I think speaks well for me in this day and age.
Being a solo artist, I’ve got a pretty steady stream of really talented producers coming through my doors wanting to work with me. Every time you work with a new producer you go into a new world – you can almost reinvent yourself every time. You certainly learn so much more when each project is completely different – it’s not like seeing the same three or four band members year after year. That keeps what I do fresh. And I’m still looking good for an old bird as well. Wait until you see the [vinyl] gatefold, whew!
Is it a relief knowing all these songs you’ve worked on for the past decade now have a proper home?
They were all meant to be together initially anyway. After we put out Simulation, we backed off a bit because nothing really went off with it honestly. I got more interested in singing Italian songs, and then I went into making Hairless Toys and Take Her Up To Monto with Eddie Stevens. But this was always in the background – we always knew it would come to some kind of fruition, and so it has.
It wasn’t a difficult record to make because Barratt – who I’ve known all my musical life - is such a focused producer, it’s not a guessing game at all. He’s really like, ‘we’re doing this’, we aim for it and that’s what we achieve. That makes it very relaxing. Barratt can close his eyes and be in the middle of a club at 3am, even though he’s probably not stepped in a club for about 25 years!
The timing of this release is, seemingly by coincidence, timed perfectly for current disco revival. Does that feel strange for someone who usually operates outside of trends?
It does actually, yes! It’s particularly annoying to be shoved in with lots of other girl singers. I don’t feel like them. I feel like it comes out of clubbing all my life, since I was 15.
You know what, it’s nice to be on trend for once, though it’d be lovely if there were some f**king clubs open! I’d be murdering it; I’d be in every club going playing every remix – some of those remix packages Barratt is doing are stories unto themselves and it’d be lovely if they were in the clubs.
I think the album still works, though – there’s such a soulful, solid base to this record that it works outside of the club. Something More really works like that – it’s balearic, but it doesn’t have to be 9 O’clock in the morning after you’ve been raving, though that would be nice. It’s got a feeling you can play it in your garden, in your car, you can certainly exercise to it – there’s various ways you can absorb it. It’s seamlessly put together, but you can also listen to the tracks individually, I have no problem with that. I mean, it’s full of singles anyway. It’s very modern in a way”.
One of the finest albums of 2020, I have a lot of love for Róisín Machine. With most of the songs written by Róisín Murphy and producer Richard Barratt, it is album to get lost in. Perfect for any mood, I love the fact Róisín Machine opens with Simulation – a track that is eight and a half minutes! Bold, brilliant and bright, we hear some of Murphy’s most incredible vocal performances on this album. Amazing writing and productions mean Róisín Machine is an album you can pick up years from now and adore. FADER spoke with Murphy in 2020. They opened by stating that the culture and trend of artists putting out Disco and House albums that evoke nostalgia, futurism (or both) found its queen with Murphy’s Róisín Machine:
“A grimy and glamorous pastiche of self-mythologising disco, nostalgic British club music, post-punk iconography and Murphy’s ever-sharp hooks, Róisín Machine — which was started over a decade ago, after the release of 2007’s Gaga blueprint Overpowered, but was pre-empted by the torch-singer techno of 2015’s Hairless Toys and 2016’s Take Her Up To Monto — is relentless and brilliant, serving as both a document of Murphy’s youth exploring the underground clubs of Manchester and Sheffield and a love letter to the transformative power of a dancefloor.
Made largely in collaboration with Murphy’s long-time friend and collaborator Richard Barratt, aka DJ Parrot, Róisín Machine feels like the defining document of Murphy’s solo career so far, casting the 47-year-old as a mysterious, magnetic club denizen, the kind of person you might whisper about obsessively over the course of a lifetime without ever meeting. She switches guises constantly, and yet the record is in thrall of her, obsessed with Murphy as both a musician and a mythological figure almost to a fault. Occasionally an underappreciated or overlooked figure, Róisín Machine fits 20-plus years of overdue idol worship into an hour of tight, bone-rattling club music.
The idea that you determine your own path — do you still live by it now, as much as you did when you were young?
Maybe more. Since Hairless Toys, I’ve kinda surprised myself, in terms of what I’m capable of. I’ve done everything. I’ve discovered that I can direct [videos], and creatively direct, and really be the boss of all of this. And I like being the boss. I can’t be the boss with these music producers, people like Maurice Fulton, DJ Koze, Parrot, Matthew Herbert — I’m not the boss in that situation, in a situation where I’m 50/50, making a piece of music with a guy; I have to be malleable, I have to be open. With the rest, I’m starting to really take over, and I quite surprised myself. But you can’t make all of yourself; it’s only a small part, but it’s an important part. You are stuck with the way you were brought up as well. But if there’s anything you can claw for yourself, do it. It’s right through all my songs, all my music, all the albums — that sense that there’s constraints, and there’s freedoms, and somewhere in-between, you can make something of yourself. Make your own story.
There’s a lot of talk about how the music industry has changed since the 90s and 2000s, but I feel like you more than anyone are more equipped to talk about the material realities of what’s changed. What do you think the biggest differences are for you?
I always get asked this question and it’s really hard for me to answer, because it’s been so incremental and I’ve continued throughout. Much less has changed for me than has not changed, believe it or not. I continue to make music within bubbles of total artistic control. That’s where everything starts, anyway; that’s why I have to be so modest and humble with these fuckin’ mavericks that I work with, because if I get good music, I can throw any image at it, I can throw any visual at it, and it’ll sing. I can go on tour for two years and it’ll be fuckin’ brilliant, because I’m on the back of a great record. So none of that’s changed, and you know, I make music and visuals from the same place I’ve always made them from, which is a place of curiosity and natural will. I just really want to have a go at things. What’s more important is what’s been the same, always. People always assume, perhaps when you’re a girl and you’re a singer, and you’ve worn the odd tight skirt and that, that she’s not had her own way completely. But I’ve had my own way, and I can’t complain”.
I want to finish with some positive reviews for the amazing and staggering Róisín Machine. One of te best-reviewed albums of 2020, it is a shame that more radio stations do not play music from it. Many of the tracks would work in T.V. shows or wider afield. I wonder whether Murphy has been approached in that regard. In any case, here is what DIY noted in their review of the colossus that is Róisín Machine:
“Speculating about why disco is having yet another resurgence is something of a fool’s errand. But it must be more than a coincidence that, like with every other resurgence, this one coincides with a new Róisín Murphy project.
And this is her most defiantly disco record to date. Where ‘Overpowered’ or ‘Take Her Up To Monto’ might veer off on prog or avant garde jaunts, ‘Róisín Machine’ is lit exclusively by the glitterball. Ever since ‘Sing It Back’, it’s where she’s felt most at home. But this is Róisín’s idea of disco. Disco, for the most part, is fairly surface level. Good times, bright lights, sweaty bodies. If it makes you move, it’s a winner. If it makes you think too, to Róisín, that’s even better.
Album highlight ‘Incapable’ has all the facets of a disco classic. Soaring synths, funky bass lines, crisp percussion, a hypnotic rhythm. It’s a lose-yourself in-the-smoke-machine kind of tune. But listen closer and her refrain of “Never had a broken heart” strikes less as a celebration of The One and more as a questioning of emotional emptiness. That refrain is sung with a real delicacy, before she flips to a growl with the line “Am I incapable of love?” It’s a blues song disguised as a dancefloor smash. The pining of Glen Campbell remixed by Chic.
It’s a darker, tenser idea of disco that ‘Narcissus’ continues. Fizzing with paranoia and self-doubt, but still eminently danceable; the frantic strings building a restlessness in contrast to the four-to-the-floor beat. ‘We Got Together’, meanwhile, is perhaps the closest Róisín has come to emulating Grace Jones. There’s shades of ‘Private Life’ as though put through a shredder and repurposed for a warehouse rave in the ‘90s.
Much of ‘Róisín Machine’ dates back years, with this album charting a long-term collaboration between Róisín and DJ Parrot. Many have even been singles without a home over the last decade. The ‘Simulation’ that opens the album feels like Róisín duetting with her 2012 single; the delicate vocals of the original rubbing up against her more gravelly 2020 voice.
With this passage of time demonstrated so clearly, it almost feels like there’s never been a right time for Róisín Murphy. The 2012 ‘Simulation’ was never really the smash it deserved to be. But it’s obvious that’s never worried her. “The album is called ‘Róisín Machine’ because I am a machine. I never stop,” she said of the album. Like Grace Jones, it’s clear Róisín isn’t one to follow trends. A maverick at home both in the disco as in the artist’s collective, she’s here to set them”.
The last thing I want to include is a review from Loud and Quiet. Pretty much right across the board, Róisín Machine found fervent and passionate praise. A wonderous album that draws you in and stays in the brain long after you have heard it, I feel it reverberates in 2022. It is an album that we all need to hear and hold onto:
“The spirit of Róisín Machine is characterized in one simple line: “How dare you sentence me to a lifetime without dancing?” Sung over updated ’70s disco and house, this is Róisín Murphy’s unashamed club record. Its ten tracks are all about being in a sweaty, crowded room and dancing away your heartbreak.
Half of the tracks are already familiar, having trickled out over the last decade, but the former Moloko frontwoman’s collaboration with DJ Parrot – aka Crooked Man – was stalled due to life and small children. The momentum picked up over the last year with a trio of modern classics and has finally tipped into this overdue fifth solo album-cum-singles package.
Despite such a protracted labour, the release’s track-listing is seamless. Production styles and music trends may have changed but the oldest of these singles – 2012’s ‘Simulation’ – still sounds blissfully contemporary. Opening with weepy strings and self-affirming dialogue, it chugs into action with hissing hi-hats, heavy breathing, and funky bassline.
This reduction to the bare essentials, with slowly unspooling deep house and disco grooves, references ’70s disco cuts while mashing in fresh sounds (the wonky synth on ‘We Got Together’; the taut, dramatic strings on ‘Narcissus’). There’s also something of the era in the repeated lyrical theme of ‘I Will Survive’ personal endurance, not least when the “keep on” refrain on ‘Murphy’s Law’ reappears on next track ‘Game Changer’.
These heartfelt concerns offer Murphy the opportunity to display her impressive range. The vaguely psychedelic ‘Kingdom Of Ends’ seesaws between the cool, Grace Jones-esque archness and soulful sincerity. The sparse ‘Game Changer’ combines the staccato delivery of early Moloko with bruised, bluesy tones.
It’s this emotional core that helps make Róisín Machine such a sweaty celebration of the dancefloor, its redeeming power making it well worth its lengthy gestation”.
Last year, Crooked Machine was released. This is remixes of the songs from Róisín Machine. I wonder what will come next for the legendary Murphy. Herr most commercially successful solo album, Róisín Machine reached fourteen on the album chart. There is a lot of love out there for the masterful Róisín Murphy. Go and find her latest studio album, turn the volume up and…
LET it do its work!