Morcheeba Trip-Hops Off the Charts

Published June 14, 2001, in CandidCritic.com.

Review by Matthew Webber

There was a moment two or three years ago when the trip-hop genre threatened to become the Next Big Thing, the wagon on which MTV, Rolling Stone and everybody who ever wore a slap bracelet could band. Portishead had already had a hit single in heavy radio rotation, Tricky was finding critical and some commercial success and Morcheeba was developing an aboveground following in Britain and an underground following in the States.

I blinked and the moment passed, which is probably a good thing for music fans. Otherwise, we’d be faced with the trip-hop equivalents of Seven Mary Three and Linkin Park.

Instead we’re left to listen to the genre’s pioneers, including Morcheeba, whose 2000 album, Fragments of Freedom, revels in the fact that approximately 71 American citizens will buy it. The album is good enough that if top forty and modern rock DJs somehow discovered it beneath their stacks of Creed and Matchbox Twenty singles they’d kill it like they kill everything good.

And it’s so good you pray these DJs and their legions of O-Town fans will never, ever know it exists.

For the uninitiated listener, Fragments of Freedom works as a representative sample of Morcheeba or the trip-hop genre. Morcheeba continues doing what it and other trip-hoppers always done: blend dance-able beats with hum-able melodies in such a smooth way that one wonders why so few have copied it.

For the seasoned veteran, it’s a departure for the group and trip-hop in ways that a band like Crazy Town and its crap/metal homies will never know. Morcheeba includes more hip-hop elements on this album than on prior efforts, with brilliant guest appearances (believe it or not, such a thing is actually possible) from the great old school MC, Biz Markie, and the up-and-coming female rhymer, Bahamadia. The album even includes a Jimmy Buffett-style party song.

A rap producer could learn much from Morcheeba in creating and releasing tension – or else he could just sample one of the band’s fat drumbeats.

Morcheeba could school a rock producer in both blending and highlighting every instrument, voice and sound effect – or else the band could just keep making great records that few people bother to listen to.