musiques actuelles
Morcheeba
A return trip
Skye Edwards flanked by brothers Paul and Ross Godfrey Skye Edwards entourée des frères Paul et Ross Godfrey
With original singer Skye Edwards back on vocal duties, Morcheeba has rediscovered the trip-hop spirit that won over critics and fans alike before she first departed the band.
B
eing classified as “trip-hop” became something of a burden in the late 1990s. Of course, it is questionable whether trip-hop ever really truly existed in the real world away from the lazy labelling by music journalists and as a convenient tag with which compilations could be marketed. But serious pioneers of the socalled Bristol sound, such as Portishead and Massive Attack and Tricky, were exploring new avenues by the time brothers Paul and Ross Godfrey recruited singer Skye Edwards for their first recordings under the name Morcheeba. Debut album Who Can You Trust? was defiantly trip-hop and was also well-received by critics – Stephen Thomas Erlewine of All Music wrote: “The trio has a keen sense of how to make a pop melody seem dangerous and foreign
TEXTES Duncan Roberts
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OKTOBER’13 CITY Agenda LUXEMBOURG
by having it crawl out of the murk of creeping beats and ominous samples.” Six albums and 17 years later, with Skye Edwards having taken a seven-year hiatus from the band, Morcheeba are close to being back to their very best. Because at the turn of the millennium, the band did appear to abandon those more “dangerous and foreign” elements of their music and at one point seemed to be heading down the road marked “lounge pop” aimed at middle-class suburbanites with expensive hi-fi systems and a collection of CDs brought out only for dinner parties. That route paid off, though, as the group reached the zenith of its popularity and played the V Festival and Hollywood Bowl. But then Edwards quit and launched her own career, which was a real challenge after both of the labels