Roísín Murphy: Take Her Up to Monto review – still too strange for the bigtime

In 2007, Roísín Murphy signed to a major label and released her second solo album, Overpowered. The artwork featured the singer dressed in a variety of insane designer outfits – among them a dress with a lighting rig attached to it – in a succession of mundane settings: a pub, a park, a greasy-spoon cafe. Elsewhere, there was an inexplicable diagram featuring photographs of budgerigars, drawings of fish and quotations from Laurie Anderson, Tammy Wynette, Samuel Beckett and Murphy herself: “I got signed to EMI because I reminded them of Robbie Williams,” she deadpanned.

This was all the handiwork of artist Scott King, whose presence at Murphy’s behest might have alerted her new label to the fact that it probably hadn’t chanced upon a female answer to Stoke-on-Trent’s most famous son. King’s other interactions with the pop world include a long association with flammable 90s glam band Earl Brutus, lobbying Southend council to erect a 300ft golden statue of Dr Feelgood frontman Lee Brilleaux on the town’s seafront, and How I’d Sink American Vogue, a set of proposals for the fashion magazine, including the suggestion that it should feature Slade guitarist Dave Hill on the cover.

Still, you could see why EMI thought Murphy could become a mainstream pop star, and not just because her previous outfit, Moloko, had successfully balanced the deeply odd with a succession of pop-house hit singles. It’s virtually obligatory when reviewing Murphy’s solo albums to bemoan her failure to become wildly famous; it’s understandably held to be a sad indictment of British pop culture that an artist who makes consistently intriguing, adventurous music that is nevertheless firmly rooted in electronic pop, who is possessed of an intriguing, individual creative vision and who looks fantastic – like a proper pop star, rather than a blandly pretty face with access to a stylist – seems condemned to exist in the margins of cult success.

But her fifth album, the follow-up to last year’s Mercury-nominated Hairless Toys, shows there are reasons for her not transcending that cult success. Its title is a reference to Dublin’s red-light district, taken from the lyrics of a cheerily filthy folk song popularised by the Dubliners. Its cover features an out-of-focus shot of Murphy in hi-vis jacket and hard hat wobbling through a building site. Its opening track, Mastermind, offers one possible answer to a theoretical question about what prog rock might have sounded like in the highly unlikely event that it had co-opted Giorgio Moroder’s brand of electronic disco: nearly seven meandering, episodic minutes of unlikely chord changes and unexpected lurches in key, allied to chattering synth arpeggios and the distinctive boo-booing of early 80s syndrums, replete with a two-minute long instrumental coda.

That is followed by Pretty Gardens, a vaguely jazzy electronic swing with lyrics that appear to be about pubic hair – you might describe its general tenor as anti-Brazilian if said phrase didn’t currently conjure up the image of a dim Brexiter accosting a man called Carlos on a bus and telling him to go back where he came from. Unlike Hairless Toys’ eccentric but sharp redrawing of deep house and electronica – indeed, unlike every previous Murphy solo album – this doesn’t really feel like music that, in a more just and interesting world, might end up on Radio 1.

That’s not strictly true of every song – the fragile ballad Whatever is beautiful, Ten Miles High’s slow progression from a curious blend of ambience and vaguely Queen-like pomp to pounding house music is impressively effortless – but Take Her Up to Monto is marked by tracks that feel slippery and hard to grasp, where the balance between texture and tunes seems slightly out of whack. There’s more here in the way of sonic curiosity than memorable tunes. There are a load of great ideas in Thoughts Wasted’s protracted complaint about drunk dialling – an R&B shimmer that breaks into a peculiar instrumental section, equal parts baroque pop and Steve Reichish minimalism, then a gloomy, ambient, spoken-word finale – but they feel somehow less than the sum of their parts. Nervous Sleep does conjure up a recognisable sensation of fidgety, small-hours dread, but it just goes on too long, dissipating its impact.

It’s never less than intriguing, and certainly unique, but Take Her Up to Monto is diverting rather than stunning. It’s hard to work out if it is a defiantly off-beam statement from an artist happier on the margins, or just an album that wears its genesis as quirky offcuts from the Hairless Toys sessions a little too clearly. Perhaps this is music that would have made for interesting B-sides and extra tracks on CD singles in an age when B-sides and CD singles still existed. The mainstream pop star everyone seems to think Roísín Murphy should rightfully be seems further away than ever. But perhaps that’s exactly how she wants it.