1. Familiar Feeling
2. I Want You
3. Absent Minded Friend
4. Day For Night
5. Come On/Fun For Me
6. Where Is The What If The What Is In Why?
7. Cannot Contain This
8. Pure Pleasure Seeker
9. The Time Is Now
10. Statues
11. 100%
12. Forever More
13. Sing It Back
14. Being Is Bewildering
15. Blow By Blow
16. Indigo
Last year, Moloko celebrated their 10th anniversary and this DVD, the band's first full length disc, captures the final gig of their worldwide tour, filmed at Brixton Academy in November 2003. Roisin Murphy and company have always been a cut above the average band, and while they can be frustratingly self-indulgent at times, they more than make up for this with several moments of pure pop brilliance.
Live, the band do a sterling job of recreating their smooth, polished sound and Murphy's vocals throughout are immaculate. Yet what makes Moloko a band really worth watching is Roisin Murphy herself. Simply put, the woman is a star. She manages to look impossibly glamourous in her entrance to Familiar Feeling, despite wearing a mask and having what appears to be a giant octopus draped round her shoulders.
Murphy exudes charisma and sex appeal throughout the performance, whether it be wrapping a fluorescent rope around her during Cannot Contain This or dropping rose petals on her head during the excellent Forever More. In fact, during the highly charged rendition of Pure Pleasure Seeker, in which Murphy slaps her own backside while clad in a leather cap and thigh high boots, male viewers may be advised to watch their blood pressure...
It's a good job Murphy is such an attractive stage presence as the rest of the band, though undoubtedly talented musicians, don't exactly exude charisma. Only the bowler hat-wearing keyboardist Eddie Stevens shows any sign of personality - he looks a bit like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, not too surprising considering that's where Moloko took their name from.
Yet when the music is this good, that hardly matters. The highlights of the band's back catalogue are covered, with the Things To Make And Do and Statues albums being particularly well featured. There's also some early material, such as Day For Night, but the highlight has to be The Time Is Now, a gliding masterpiece of a song which Murphy wanders into the front row of the audience to sing.
It doesn't all work - the title track from Statues becomes a bit dull, while the exhilarating Sing It Back is drawn out for over 12 minutes, with too much reliance on vocoder effects. It's a blessed relief when the musical noodling is abandoned and the song's heavenly chorus swoops in. Yet as Murphy even indulges in a spot of crowd surfing during the encore of Indigo, it's clear that Moloko place a high price on entertainment value.
The only notable extra is a 20 minute video diary from keyboardist Eddie Stevens, which is fun to watch once, but probably won't stand up to repeated viewing unless you're a huge fan. It's the gig footage that makes this DVD an excellent purchase, either as a souvenir if you had a ticket, or to see what you missed if you didn't.