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Morcheeba announce new album ‘Head Up High’ (US)

2 min read

With a career spanning over 18 years and with millions of album sold worldwide, Morcheeba now return with their eighth studio album. Head Up High is due for release on October 15th 2013. This follow up to 2010’s Blood Like Lemonade sees the band enlist Chali 2na (Jurassic 5), James Petralli (White Denim), Rizzle Kicks, Ana Tijoux and Nature Boy, highlighting the magnitude of their career and influence on a wide variety of artists old and new.
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The biggest changes in the band’s sound, though, are provided by the retrained post-dub step elements coming through in some songs such as the wobbly synth bass underpinning the urgent dancehall throb of Make Believer, and the jerky rhythm of the bittersweet To The Grave, a song about guilty secrets.
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Ana Tijoux isn’t the only guest featured on Head Up High. Rappers Nature Boy, Jim Kelly and Jurassic 5’s Chali 2Na appear on the sinister “Release Me Now” and the infectious, loping strider “Face Of Danger” respectively, the latter song a celebration of shame-free liberation and self-determination.
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For the other tracks, Paul wrote lyrics using the cut-up method devised by William Burroughs and most famously employed by David Bowie. “I took phrases I admired from a load of my favorite books – writers like Philip K. Dick – put them in a bag and drew them out, putting relevant ones together, and the mood and feeling of a song would come together from that,” he explains. “It was just a nice, fresh way of approaching it. With the English language, it’s so difficult to reinvent the wheel, despite its flexibility.”