Spectreview: Róisín Murphy – Róisín Machine

Released: October 2, 2020

Pop
(Avant-Pop)
(House)
(Nu-Disco)

-FUCHSIA PINK-

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“I feel my story’s still untold
But I’ll make my own happy ending”

I’ve been thinking about music lately, and movement. Other art mediums, like movies and video games or books, require your undivided visual attention. There’s less room for interpretation where it doesn’t pertain to narrative nuance or symbolism; in other words, what you see is largely what you get. In comparison, almost four decades after the success of the Walkman, music is now often defined by what you’re experiencing along with it. A bus ride across the city past crowds of individuals, or a drive down the interstate under an unending sky, can provoke wholly different responses to what’s playing.

If 2020 hasn’t felt like a strong year for music, that’s honestly probably why. Under the shadow of the plague, many of us feel unsafe simply leaving our houses. To be confined to our residences robs music of the power we’ve known it’s had since well before the entrenchment of the record industry.

It’s curious, then, that disco has emerged as a dominant motif in today’s pop music. Disco was once a social nexus for diversity and free sexual expression, its clubs operating as blessedly safe havens for both LGBT and ethnic minorities. The common writers of history (in this case, Steve Dahl and his crowd of sycophants) may have demolished the genre for good, but its myriad innovations factored right into the explosion of electronic dance music in the mid 90s. That nexus, meanwhile, is now available to anyone with access to the Internet, which houses as many communities for social outcasts as you can imagine. We might be desperately afraid at the moment to share sweat with strangers, but the last few years have lined up a huge comeback, at least in spirit, in that most unfairly-abhorred of genres.

I’ve heard a lot of disco revival over the waves this year, much of it passively pleasant at worst, but Róisín Murphy’s fifth album since her debut in 2005 is the record I find myself replaying over and over since it dropped last month. Murphy, an Irish singer-songwriter with a penchant for avant-garde fashion and the sleek sound it comes with, has long approached pop from a cerebral angle. Róisín Machine, however, is Murphy in a fitting environment: extended nu-disco jams covered with cheap liquor and smeared makeup, the weight of Western excessiveness exhaled in every breath. It is the ideal dance record for a time of quarantine, given that its euphoric ramp-ups are often tempered with a pensive, almost nervous undercurrent.

Murphy’s Bowie-like ability to shift her image with the music works just as well here as it did on Ruby Blue and Hairless Toys. This is evident just from the cover. Winged out and clad in fishnets, Murphy lies bent and upside-down as if tossed about and discarded by her desires, her stare as eye-catching as it is penetrating. Róisín Machine, its title a forked allusion to the exhaustion of today’s content creation, moves with a related weariness that informs its sonic liberations. On “Kingdom of Ends,” Murphy airs her grievances at a culture of excess to an ominous build-up that never really resolves. That song is answered by the revelatory sunrise of “Something More,” which takes a gentle arpeggiation and a beautifully-cresting chorus into a hangover ballad. We’ve seen that kind of weariness before, in Bryan Ferry’s romantic croon behind Roxy Music and in Grace Jones’ clear-eyed detachment, but it comes through so clearly in Murphy’s chanteuse-like image that it helps this record transcend pastiche, into something more fearlessly contemporary.

The rest of Róisín Machine shakes off the nerves and strides on the dance floor, certainly more aggressively than anything Murphy done since her debut. There’s the deep grooves of “Simulation,” the ebullient “Shellfish Mademoiselle,” the runway house of “Incapable,” the hot sweat of “We Got Together,” the pizzicato-laden “Narcissus” and more: all different kinds of iterations on nu-disco, all anchored by Murphy’s sultry voice. It all flows remarkably, waxing and waning like a memorable night out, its bursts of melody closer to simple pleasures than much else in her catalogue.

Despite the anxious shadows in the corners, Róisín Machine is not ultimately a downcast record. It might smack of weltschmerz, but it moves nonetheless in search of some new day. “Murphy’s Law” (a cheeky title given the artist’s surname) stands as the record’s centerpiece for that very reason. Against an irresistible discotheque progression, its central character hits the scene buffeted from bad love and failed relationships, hopeful but not naïve about the limits of the present tense. It’s that classic redemptive spirit – letting it all out in the face of imminent despair – that pushes Róisín Machine from a great record to a sublime one, especially in a time of private dances.

Highly recommended for bedroom drinking.