MORCHEEBA
Who Can You Trust?
(Warners)
IT has been quite a while since an album like Portishead's Dummy put shivers down the spine. Often when the hype mill starts to grind with a gnashing of the jaws the album that you've been anticipating arrives and rarely lives up to expectations. Portishead was always the exception to the rule and a London outfit by the unlikely and exotic name of Morcheeba - who amazingly bypassed the hype - have delivered a debut album that is as haunting and spine-tingling as it's Bristol cousins'.
Who Can You Trust? in name and essence has the carboniferous blue air of mystery and paranoia. It paints images of urban sprawls, dark backstreets, torch eroticism, sleazy suggestion and abstract dancehall blues spread across fuzz bass, slinky vocals and stoned spliffed riffs.
After catching up with them recently for a chat, one suspicion can be confirmed, as people they are as subtle, moody and emotionally warm as the music they create.
Morcheeba (translation: Mor meaning middle-of-the-road and Cheeba spliff) consists of vocalist Skye, brothers Ross and Paul Godfrey and Pete Norris create the kind of porous and sensory abstract beatz that painters would drool over.
The sultry and humid lullaby, Moog Island, shuffles through sparse Polynesian foliage and melancholy spacial atmospherics and puts you into the chill'out zone before notching up the tempo with the swagger and opiated density of Trigger Hippie. Skye's vocals are a mixture of innocence harlot and angel amid eastern strains. Post Houmous is fuzz bass heaven while Tape Loop is a hybrid of the Stereo MC's and Pink Floyd riding high on a cocktail chemical ecstasy.
Never An Easy Way continues the exploration of lyrical vulnerabilities of relationships through liquid trip hop nectar and soaring psychedelia. Howling jangles and ripples through a formulae of British guitar pop shoegazing, orchestral and raffish delivery and Skye's fragile harmonies.
Small Town has the texture of crushed velvet while heartland blues are strummed briefly on Enjoy The Wait. The classical funeral march Col with its soulful and dramatic weeping strings is the most fragile of all odes. The instrumental title track is a dirty, swampy dirge of cheeba blues and herbal hallucinations bathed in a night-sweat.
Who Can You Trust doesn't embrace the shadows and sinister nuances that Portishead are synonymous for although in it's pelvic thrust delivery, haunting vocals and at it's sonic core it is the closest relation that I've yet heard to Portishead.
This is an album to savour, to explore and to truly take you "out there" or "in there" - whichever is your vice.
(8)
