Skye Edwards out. Daisy Martey in. EastWest out. Echo in. Credibility out. Implausibility in. Just before you continue with all this hokery-cokery you may need reminding that things have changed a wee bit since 2002’s Charango and 1993’s Big Calm. Morcheeba are no longer that likeable if fairly unobtrusive light trip-hop act they’re a mighty big and cavernous psychedelic airship of a band trading the kind of far-reaching baroque wares more traditionally associated with pioneering sixties producer and auteur, David Axelrod, San Francisco’s Jefferson Airship, Hexdrix and Love’s ridiculously overblown and conceptual nutscape, ‘Forever Changes’. Cue the constant whir of a harpsichord, heavily mic’d up drums, random bursts of orchestration, finger clicks, oodles of melodrama, ad hoc synthesizer noises and gratuitous Hispanic overtones, all of which are heaped like treacle on tracks like ‘Wonders Never Cease’, ‘Everybody Loves A Loser’, ‘Living Hell’ and the fiercely enormous and psychedelic ‘People Carrier’. Frankly, you won’t know whether to love it or get someone to slap you around the face with a wet fish to prove you haven’t lost your mind. On tracks like ‘Lighten Up’, however, Morcheeba return to more familiar territory with something of a bright, breezy and folk-flavoured pop number echoing the likes of Fairport Convention and The Sundays (well at least Tin Tin and Out version).
Once you get over the time-slip and genre-lag it’s a far from unattractive proposition, but like going into town to shop with your mum, it’s occasionally just a little embarrassing.