Simian Mobile Disco – Murmurations LP

Review from Pitchfork

Simian Mobile Disco team up with all-female singing collective Deep Throat Choir for an adventurous full-length that is their first album to prominently feature vocals in nearly a decade.

Over the last decade, Simian Mobile Disco have charted a singular career by relying almost solely on their own creative impulses. Despite rising to prominence amid the “bloghouse” fad of the mid-2000s, the duo of James Ford and Jas Shaw has remained largely unconcerned with passing trends in electronic music. Their fifth full-length, Murmurations, is a bit of a paradox: It’s easily the most adventurous album they’ve crafted to date. But it also takes the act full circle, connecting their bloghouse-era output with their more abstruse later career.

The album is Simian Mobile Disco’s first to prominently feature vocals since 2009’s Temporary Pleasure, which spotlighted singers like Beth Ditto and Yeasayer’s Chris Keating. But Ford and Shaw abandon their old guest-vocalist approach on Murmurations, collaborating instead with Deep Throat Choir, an all-female singing collective led by British musician Luisa Gerstein. You’ve likely heard Gerstein’s work without knowing it: “Cups,” her a cappella reimagining of the Carter Family’s 1931 song “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?,” became a top-10 hit for Anna Kendrick after the actress performed it in Pitch Perfect. Along with Heloise Tunstall-Behrens, her bandmate in the psych-rock act Landshapes, Gerstein has songwriting credits on nearly half of the album.

The music on Murmurations isn’t nearly as chart-friendly as “Cups,” and that’s for the best. Together, Simian Mobile Disco and Deep Throat Choir craft a hallucinatory sonic world: Vocal swells crest and crash against Ford and Shaw’s signature tick-tock techno. The combination is dreamlike—and sometimes even a bit nightmarish; this is certainly not “easy listening.” Like a virtual-reality headset, the 3D textures of Deep Throat Choir’s echo-laden exultations, layered atop Ford and Shaw’s rabbit-hole rhythms, might make listeners queasy at first. But once you surrender to the album’s off-kilter vibe, it’s easy to lose yourself in it.