Morcheeba

On most recent album Blood Like Lemonade, Paul & Ross Godfrey re-unite with Skye on vocals for the first time since 2002, restoring the original inimitable laidback charm that made Morcheeba the mainstay of many a chill-out session.

"One thing Morcheeba's always tried to do is make the record we don't already have in our record collection," explains Ross Godfrey, the trio's guitarist and all-round multi-instrumentalist. "I can come home from the pub and spend hours going through thousands of old vinyl records trying to find the one perfect record to fit the moment, and that's always the one we wanted to make ourselves, with that 3am, spliffed-out sound, like a warm, fuzzy blanket of psychedelia."

Blood Like Lemonade is the album they've been searching for all these years, one which takes the essence of earlier classics like Who Can You Trust? and Big Calm, and transports it to exotic new places. At its heart are the band's trademark oozing downtempo trip-hop grooves, embellished with intriguing, idiosyncratic flourishes like the African thumb-piano of Even Though, the sitar drone and blues harmonica of Mandala, and the freak-folk guitar jangle of I Am The Spring, and topped off with Skye's intimately soulful vocals. It's also at once their most introspective album, with songs which illuminate the band's personal situation, and their most outward-looking, as Paul Godfrey's lyrics pursue characters into uncharted territories: from the avenging vampire of 'Blood Like Lemonade', the abandoned astronaut of 'Even Though', the homicidal dinner-party host of 'Recipe For Disaster', to the Viking explorers of 'Beat Of The Drum'.