Róisín Murphy’s debut post-Moloko solo album was released in 2005 and was made up of mostly previously released material made in collaboration with maverick UK dance/electronic producer Matthew Herbert. Herbert’s approach at the time was to use samples of everyday sounds and objects, often alongside big band brass and this album is full of Herbert’s trademark reworked and repurposed sonic snippets and otherworldly-sounding percussion.

The careful addition of measured big band brass elements works superbly: “If We’re In Love” is chrome-edged glitter-ball R’n’B with a Billboard #1-worthy vocal hook, Herbert’s gentle brass arrangement adding an additional soothing layer of sophistication, and undulating brass swells also sweeten the already honeyed, subdued soul-jazz of “Through Time,” while on “Sinking Feeling,” jazzy horn stabs somehow meld with Herbert’s tin pot percussion into a robot-jazz-torch-song. With its rich mix of experi-pop, electro-soul, raw ballads, cutting-edge electronica and more, Ruby Blue is intriguing and challenging, bad and beautiful.

– Harold Heath

Róisín Murphy described the process of working with Matthew Herbert on this album as: “like he’s taking your fingerprints… like he’s extracting the truth that’s there from you.” Ruby Blue is Murphy’s first solo record, following the end of her creative and romantic relationship with Mark Brydon in Moloko, and truly it is as bold a statement of her unique creative essence as she could have hoped to offer up. Herbert’s micro-sampling and hyper-processing merge perfectly into pop, soul and dance music values, and Murphy’s natural vaudevillian instincts, to create a total world that you have no choice but to give yourself up to completely. Astoundingly the preposterous boinging kettle drums and alien voices of “Ramalama (Bang Bang)” gave her one of her biggest tracks, but for all the weirdness, every track here is infinitely memorable, gigantically fun, and bears endless replays.

– Joe Muggs