Martha Skye Murphy - Um (2024) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Lushly orchestrated and featuring guest appearances from Roy Montgomery and claire rousay, Martha Skye Murphy's debut solo album is a dynamic, dramatic chamber pop 'artmelter that sets its flag somewhere between FKA Twigs, Beth Gibbons and Julia Holter.

Murphy's been working hard to make her mark on the musical fringes over the last few years. Since her precocious debut in 2009, adding vocals to Nick Cave's score for 'The Proposition' when she was just nine years old, she's released a slew of promising singles, EPs and soundtracks. In 2022, she appeared alongside Maxwell Sterling on the whimsical 'Distance on Ground', and last year was spotted with NZ legend Roy Montgomery on the exceptional 'At Dawn'. Her first album is expectedly ambitious, building on her decades of outerzone experience and muddling intimate and lavish pop strokes to land on an emotional, hook-laden expression that flat-out refuses to tread the well-lit path.

Her alloy of lo-fi and hi-fi techniques is particularly intriguing, from the opening blast of ferric environmental scratches and extravagant orchestra tune-up drones on the brief 'First Day', to the final response, 'Forgive', a collaboration with claire rousay that buries plaintive piano motifs in a earthy dictaphone recordings and lucid hums. But these almost ambient moments are only scratching the surface: Murphy dominates the album with her acrobatic voice, that she transforms from a mournful coo into a jazzy crackle sometimes in the space of a few bars. On 'Need', she's accompanied by Roy Montgomery's unmistakable reverberating guitar coruscations and casual, lower-register vocals, almost whispering at first before she veers into skeletal folk and builds up to a simmering choral crescendo.

"It's a clear, such a clear day, it's a clear day, to me," she reflects on 'Pick Yourself Up', steering her voice through knotted, distorted beats, percussive prepared piano flourishes and metallophone chimes. It's a surprising track, struck through with the energy of radio pop but produced and arranged with an ear towards the avant garde - those operatic shrieks in the final third are just the icing on the cake. And she's just as commanding when she's working with more familiar structures, winding affecting words - "let's fight together, let's soak in the weight of each other" - around slo-mo breaks and wild-eyed FM synth squiggles.

Murphy's eager to embed her "very intimate domestic space" with exterior tensions, infusing her personal stories with references to ancient torture methods and Hollywood dance routines. So a track like 'Kind', an anxious roil of serpentine, diaristic statements that dribbles from dimly-lit, guitar and horn-led ambience into a cacophony of harpsichords, soprano screams and squashed drums, can sit comfortably next to the more cryptic, mystical 'The Words', that barely snaps its folksy backbone. 'Um' is a rare debut - fully-formed and shockingly well realized, filled with labyrinthine twists and turns and never, ever predictable. Thumbs up.

Tracklist:
1. First Day (00:53)
2. Need (04:24)
3. Pick Yourself Up (03:22)
4. Theme Parks (04:41)
5. Spray Can (04:40)
6. Call Me Back (02:46)
7. Kind (04:30)
8. The Words (02:06)
9. Dust Yourself Off (02:05)
10. IRL (04:49)
11. Forgive (04:16)


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