The Candy Shop #5

The Candy Shop #5:

A Taste of Moloko

by Nayt Housman

Last week we treated you to a warming winter treat that simmered gently from the inside out. This week we’re treating you to a winter warmer that will warm you from the outside in and tickle your funny bone while it’s there.


In the era that was the nineties, my taste for quirky sweet treats was well under way. Then in 1999 I heard something that changed my music life. It was like eating Pop Rocks for the first time but better. Like it was Pop Rocks blended with the finest chocolate and then thrown in a milkshake, then made into ice cream and then made into an ice cream cake. It was an electro pop, disco masterpiece, so smooth, yet sparklier than Kylie Minogue dressed head to toe in Swarovski crystals in a room of glitter balls. It was Moloko with their breakthrough single ‘Sing It Back,’ taken from the 1998 album ‘I Am Not A Doctor’.

Sing It Back

Sung as if Roisin is the snake in the Garden of Eden, seducing Adam and Eve into a saucy ménage a trois, ‘Sing It Back ‘is sultry and sexy and tells the story of the intoxication of lust.


The Flipside

The internal voices speak loudly in ‘The Flipside’. It’s uneasy and nerve wracking, like an internal interrogation. Not recommended for those who fear alien abduction or have trouble ignoring the voices in their head.


Should’ve Been, Could’ve Been

Trip hop infused and somber, contemplative and bubbling with sultry mood, ‘Should’ve Been, Could’ve Been’ resembles the Valium (in the best kind of way) of the album.

Fronted by Roisin Murphy and produced by DJ Mark Brydon, Moloko combined the perfect recipe of disco, soul, electro/synth pop, and house with a large slathering of quirk and one of the most distinctive voices in pop music to date. ‘I Am Not A Doctor’ is a lush, detailed mesh of electronic bliss. Choppy and pulsing like an erratic heartbeat in parts, soft and cascading like chiffon curtains writhing on a breeze in others; always bloated with atmosphere, the weird, nervous, suspicious, sexual and cocky tones to this music adventure make it unmistakably “Moloko” and an album that changed what I thought music could be.