Things To Make And Do

IT'S AMAZING what a remix can do. Twelve months ago Moloko were trip-hop also-rans, a bargain basement Portishead whose main contribution to popular music had been calling their debut album Do You Like My Tight Sweater? Then along came Boris Dlugosch with his totally unsolicited remix of 'Sing It Back' and, hey presto, Rsismn Murphy and Mark Brydon were suddenly the next big thing.

Realising what side their bread's buttered on, the Anglo-Irish duo have adopted Dlugosch's 'acoustic house' blueprint as their own, and produced a record that's got one eye on the dancefloor and the other on the radio.

The opening salvo of 'Pure Pleasure Seeker' and 'Absent Minded Friends' finds them veering too far towards the latter. Pop sensibility's one thing, but there's no excuse for Eurythmics' impersonations. Murphy, in particular, doesn't need to perform Annie Lennox's stock in trade vocal gymnastics to impress. Indeed, if there's an overriding fault with Things To Make And Do (I hope they're going to give Ian Dury a few quid for nicking his title), it's that it's a bit too clever for its own good. Deciding to try their hand at quirkiness on 'Indigo', Moloko merely end up sounding like a lesser B52s. Not, one imagines, the end product they had in mind.

In contrast, 'Being Is Bewildering' is a slowburning lust song which finds Ms. Murphy at her most vampish (and least Annie). You don't have to be a 100k a year A&R man to work out why 'The Time Is Now' got the nod as the collection's lead single. Driven along by some tasteful Spanish guitar, it's the perfect six in the morning Ibiza wind-down, with a hook you can hang a club-full of silly hats on.

With such perfect poppery going down, it's easy to forget that Moloko have an experimental side, which surfaces here on the five sub-two-minute tracks. Pick of the bunch are 'A Drop In The Ocean', a self-contained exercise in Indian mysticism, and 'It's Your Problem', which dudes along in seriously funky fashion for 60 seconds and then buggers off. Intriguing.

I don't know if it's got anything to do with them being resident in Sheffield, but 'Somebody Somewhere' is a virtual reprise of The Human League's 'Don't You Want Me Baby'. The attention to detail is such that Brydon, a famed non-singer, is persuaded to take on the "This is Phil talking . . ." role. The faux sophisticates who want them to be this year's Everything But The Girl will doubtless hate it, but in terms of good old-fashioned hummability, they've struck gold.

Which I suspect is the colour of the disc that Moloko will soon be presented with. Faults and all, this is a record that's going to sell by the truck-load.