Review from The Times

UK newspaper The Times has given Roisin's new album a smashing review:

Because first impressions matter, it’s hard not to get excited when you alight upon the sleeve of RoÍsÍn Murphy’s new album. Here, amid the grey Formica of a greasy spoon, we see the sometime Moloko singer dressed in something the late Leigh Bowery might have fashioned had he been locked in a cell with two knitting needles and a barrel of brightly coloured wool. Behind her, dowdy, toothless men sip tea. They’re not actually members of Babyshambles or the View – but, for what the schism might tell you about the difference between men and women in pop right now, they may as well be.

That said, even bonkers pop mavericks need a great record on which to hang their charisma. Moloko’s odyssey from mannered trip-hoppery to nu-disco yielded enough for a decent Best Of album, but little else. Murphy’s 2005 solo debut Ruby Blue was too wilful for a world already trying to work out what to do with Björk. Now, flanked by a rollcall of London dance alumni (among them Bugz in the Attic and Groove Armada), here’s an album you can use as well as admire.

Typical of the form is You Know Me Better - a rush of colour slowly surging outwards from a hook of pared-back austerity. Here and elsewhere – in particular, Tell Everybody and Movie Star – the loved-up sentiments have flushed the gruntier vocal affectations of yore. Ecstasy being what it was in the early Nineties, there will forever be a generation of clubbers that reacts to the words “Roland 303” as most people might respond to mention of a dearly departed pet. Those same people probably won’t hear a better song than the title track all year.

Only when the beat dissipates does she struggle. “I’ll always be your little girl,” she coos on Scarlet Ribbons, a mawkish paean to her father. Its inclusion is doubly baffling given the last-minute decision to remove the moreish Teutonic disco of her Calvin Harris collaboration Off and On. Still, over 55 minutes a single lapse of judgment is forgivable.

Murphy’s confidence in her own abilities is infectious. On Cry Baby she casts herself as the remedy to her subject’s comedown. Boasting a backing track that sounds like Village People attacking Gary Numan with cowbells, it doesn’t sound like the remedy to anything. But, like most of Overpowered, it’s hard to care when all your pop pressure points are being massaged with such precision.