Legendary Album … Blood Like Lemonade (Morcheeba)
The English trip hop pop band Morcheeba has released nine albums during its career so far. This Friday the tenth album will be released under the title “Blackest Blue”.
If you take into consideration that the band has always operated in a kind of niche market, with not the easiest music that certainly cannot be called mainstream, then it is actually even better that the band with their seventh album “Blood Like Lemonade” nevertheless managed to achieve the gold status all over Europe. In addition to the return of singer Skye Edwards, the album also marks the band’s breakthrough to the wider public. In the genre the album is one of great class, which has not been outclassed so far. Not by Morcheeba itself, but also not by other bands in the genre, such as Zero 7, Lamb or Flunk. Of course, there are bigger bands that are close to Morcheeba, such as Massive Attack or Moloko, but they can certainly be called more mainstream.
Morcheeba became the band that is at its best with extremely dark lyrics on spherical sounds, in which you still hear jazz again and again, which is in any case very musical and has now managed to attract a large number of regular fans.
“Blood like Lemonade” was released in the UK on June 7, 2010 and made it to the top 10 of the album chart. The album also did very well in the rest of Europe. Fronted by the hit single “Blood Like Lemonade” the album entered the charts everywhere. Truly an achievement for music that certainly cannot be seen as mainstream.
The album marked the return of singer and lyricist Skye Edwards to the band. She was fired by phone in 2003 due to creative differences. Since that time the band has actually regretted that, because it turned out that without Edwards the previous level could not be maintained. Fellow musician and producer Paul Godfrey later acknowledged that this should have been the album that would have been Morcheeba’s successor to their second album. He acknowledged that the band had to go a long treacherous road to realize that Skye Edwards was indispensable to the band. Not only as a singer, but also as a creative brain who knows how to take the band to a higher level.
The album contains 10, mostly slow tempo tracks, of which the hit ‘Blood Like Lemonade’ is the exception. The voice of Skye Edwards can just as easily be seen as a nu-soul voice, but she knows better than anyone how to send Morcheeba to the completely unique sound that navigates between trip hop, pop and soul. It is because of this sound that the album should be seen as a “Legendary album”.
The wonderfully jazzy, lounge-like hip-hop sound still offers the perfect escape from the hectic life that imposes itself on us. Sometimes an album does not have to be a musical statement as if it were a resurrection of the old Bach. Sometimes an album stands out by catching time in a perfect way. That’s what Morcheeba did with this album.
