Review Summary: Is this me breaking free or just breaking down
For decades, we've lived in the era of lead singles and one-hit-wonders. Especially in modern pop music, so many artists will make an hour plus of music that has, maybe, 15 good minutes in it. It's not often you find releases where there are no filler tracks, and no misses. Those releases should be celebrated, and Yorkshire duo Moloko brought a joyous maximalism to music-making that was divine, one that left no room for forgetting in a perfectly-balanced release.
Starting early on with the title track, Statues deserves special mention, it's the first track that really brings in the string section to add palpable tension to what Murphy is singing about here, which is the end of relationships and the capacity within each of us for recreation, for starting anew and not giving up hope for love. Time will never stop for us to catch up, we have only today and only each other. Even the spoken section at the end almost has a harmony, it is a beautifully somber composition as the chorus twists itself around and around all throughout, a trick they love on this album—look for it again on Over and Over.
Murphy's lyrics really make this album, because they're honest. Sure, music about relationships has been done twenty million times, but it's the way she visualizes love: its unsure beginnings and bitter ends. What the casual listener needs to understand is that she's not singing about love as if it's something theoretical and abstract, her musical partner Mark Brydon was her actual partner for 8 years and they broke up in the middle of this record's creation. So that pain, that feeling of inner conflict, of wanting someone but knowing you have to move on, all of it is real and raw in her approach to the sound. To be in love is not something that can be avoided, only navigated through, so enjoy the ride where you can, and when it's over look back with gratitude for the good times.
There's many opinions on classifying this work. It's house, it's jazz, it's dance-pop, it's downtempo. However you want to characterize it, it's damn good music. Brydon's approach to what Moloko sounds like is above all an evolution from much simpler roots. It's also not trying to be anything it isn't. The music had been straining against the descriptor of "trip-hop" for at least the prior 2 albums, and undeterred by any genre constraints, Brydon explodes the whole formula into technicolor as Moloko moves into a fuller, warmer sound.
Forever More is the big song off this record, and it may be one of the heavier songs in terms of the synth line, a more classic and recognizable sound for our beloved duo. Murphy's jumps into head voice around 3 minutes in, just divine and work superbly with the groove of that up-and-down synth bassline. There's this walking piano line towards the end that bleeds into this warbling organ solo that's truthfully hard as ***. There's such a peculiar harmony to how Murphy picks her harmonies on this album, Familiar Feeling and The Only Ones are great examples as well.
Talking more about the latter, this is the best song off this album, this pinching guitar riff that's laced throughout the song in a perfect compliment to the plucking of the harp that pulls in these stunning glissandos. And the message of the lyrics are something anyone should be able to relate to:
To those with afflictions
Prone to addictions
To users and to losers
Doubters and their daughters and sons
Your Angel will come
That is to say, there is hope in finding love for all of us, that there is nobody who is not deserving of love in some capacity. Even if you're downtrodden or depressed, you must not give up, because it will be out there. And maybe that's too optimistic, but we live in hard times. In moments of great struggle we should never forget the many people who love us in all manner of ways, and never forget we can make it, if we make it together.
There is nothing Moloko promises on this record that they do not satisfy in full. Things To Do And Make was all about moving into something more melodic, organic and human, and that momentum is taken to its logical conclusion here. The music has synth, but it is far from synthetic. The gooey, emotional center of Murphy's singing is perfectly paired with string sections and synth solos to form a milieu of sound that is wonderfully warm and compelling. At the end of the day, call Statues for what it is, serotonin in a bottle, distilled joy, ambrosia in the classical sense. It is the capstone of a relationship beautifully musical and deeply personal. We should all be so lucky to live such lives, and love such loves.
