Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Placebo
Label: Universal Music Group
Release: 2013
Length: 47:22
Rating: 3/5
I won’t claim I’ve always had a soft spot for the whiny sagas of Brian Molko and his crew, but you have to admit that back then this young British trio, fronted by a guy who radiated more femininity than masculine power and libido, had a music of pain and philosophical themes of disorientation and hurt that just naturally grew into the quality backbone of nineties alternative. Incredible albums happened, Without You I’m Nothing and then Black Market Music, and then the drugs and the loss of identity started showing the first signs of deep corrosion at the very heart of the band. Sleeping With Ghosts, Meds and Battle For The Sun never managed to touch me, or even graze me enough to give me the full picture of what is now a downright nostalgic snapshot of a completely different world, different people, different times. Last year’s EP B3 was actually a return to the old comfy tracks, and I honestly hoped the album that followed would carry on from the struggle toward the light that runs through their last studio full-length, Battle For The Sun, and bring them back to the old paths of genius. The answer, and the hard evidence of where the band really stands, arrived this year in the form of Loud Like Love, an album that splits the crowd: fans, and also all of us who once valued Placebo precisely for their freshness, sharpness and originality. Honestly, if you listen to it superficially, this seventh record is a perfectly solid piece of alternative craftsmanship that you can easily fall for musically. Lyrically, though, the charge has gone flat and the essence that hurts and cuts deep is missing, and it cuts deepest for everyone who admired that tangle of pain, sexuality, androgyny, sadomasochism and narcotic shutdown in the once-young Molko. Now that the man has turned 40, become a father and a husband and left his once decadent ways behind, something of his old core just seems to be missing.
That’s a charge anyone can make with confidence after a ride aboard this new kitschy barge, though it’s true that after the melancholy, faux pop full of synth sounds, there are at least a few anchor points left for Placebo to lean on. On the twentieth anniversary of their existence (which comes up in 2014, to be exact) the guys have become masters of copying the stereotypes that make up the concept called Placebo, and by recycling “classic Placebo” they’re losing the very thread that once made us reach for Molko’s gems so eagerly and seductively, and even praise them. The power and punch of Special Needs and Every You Every Me is gone, and everything else is solid stuff that just doesn’t move you the way it used to. This is the band that Todd Haynes, in 1998, in his novel about David Bowie, a lyrical high point of a tribute to the music of the time called Velvet Goldmine, put on the musical podium as the only true heirs to the inventiveness of T-Rex. Placebo then fell into the staked-out premises of their own little world, which resisted radio play and grew emptier and more meaningless. The opening Loud Like Love does show off the production value of Adam Noble’s work, who blew a bit more warmth into the record, but he couldn’t breathe life into the surviving Placebo melancholy. After an intro that recalls R.E.M. with some of Billy Corgan’s guitar-fiddling, what follows never builds the feeling up into ecstasy. The dramatic twist that isn’t really one (at best it’s a rough return to ground that’s been heard and groped over a thousand times, and the breath of self-parodic playing with the shadows of the past has been rinsed out by Placebo to the very end). The OK Computer flavor of Scene Of The Crime is merely sonic, and the lyrics are something you’d tune out on purpose, if Molko’s high vocal weren’t the essence of the band. And what if the genie let out of the bottle has really lost its old punch and can’t pull itself together enough to repeat the tornado of feelings that were once felt, seen and admired by so many?
Brian has squeezed the last atoms of depression, despair and darkness out of himself, and Too Many Friends, with its faked line »My computer thinks I’m gay«, desperately tries to reel in the few remaining old die-hard alternative fans who once believed him completely, now, nearly two decades later … In the age of FB and an internet that’s more alive than life itself (where are you, if you’re not on social media?), the stage for this world-weary operetta dance had to be moved from the asphalt jungle into the cold shelter of one’s own depersonalized world between four walls. Technological alienation from reality and the emptiness of modern existence just gush out of the rather trivial Too Many Friends, and then a sensual squeeze of pain “happens” with Hold On To Me, where a small, fragile Molko, with questions and by baring his sensitivity, tries to press himself once more onto the canvas of a world where he once left a more visible mark, only this time the undertones are softer and the music more polished. Molko doesn’t summon his demons in a pompous way, but he still likes to go back to the slippery ground of his once self-destructive exploration of the darkest corners of his self. The ironic guitar return to the days of Every You And Every Me with Rob The Bank, settling accounts with the entire financial universe and calling out to the native fuck, only roughly gets near the outlines of the old power, like an echo or a blurry copy of a copy. In A Million Little Pieces Molko gets to the heart of it with the line »Now I feel I’ve lost my spark/No more glowing in the dark,« and I can only agree with him and keep listening, though I hear precious little that’s new. A piano ballad with sonic depth but without any real soul extract is followed by a bit of industrial banging out of the cold in Exit Wounds. The minimalism just slides by, and Placebo recreate themselves bit by bit, painfully stereotypically. The U2-ish Purify doesn’t pour the badly needed fuel on the flames of fading power, and Begin The End, with its finality, makes the corners of the once-resonant soul ache even more. »Knock me off my feet like heroin/There’s no fortress left to defend,« Molko confesses, and as for the ramparts of nihilistic disembodiment, all you can say is that navigating the murky waters of emptiness has done the once-essential poets of our age and soullessness more harm than good. The closer, the Radiohead-style Bosco, just adds the dot on the i that’s been hanging there the whole time. The dashing decadent loser is no longer here; what’s left instead is memories, nostalgia and the rest of the baggage of the past, which can block any move forward toward blooming, and of course you can easily wonder whether the Placebo tree isn’t in an age of dying off and fading bloom.
Loud Like Love is a solid alternative record that doesn’t kill the urge to listen to music, but lyrically and in essence it lacks quite a lot of what it would take for the album to call itself “the best one yet”. Molko and company need a leap out of playing with themes and patterns that have already been worked over, which they steal from themselves out of their own already praised and beloved old rustic catalog. The poetry and honesty of the past are now somehow chronically missing, and an anemic, world-weary slush of artificiality is not a card I’d bet on, or believe that the survival of the idea and its battered soul after this act is even remotely feasible. Placebo have become a pill that once knew how to hit you and get you dancing, moving, burning out, and today it no longer does the soul any good. Nomen est omen, right?
Lineup
Brian Molko – vocals, guitar, keyboards
Stefan Olsdal – bass, guitar, piano, keyboards, cimbalom, backing vocals
Steve Forrest – drums, percussion
Guest musicians:
Bill Lloyd – keyboards, bass
Fiona Brice – strings, backing vocals
Fabian Waltmann – samples
Production
Adam Noble
Tracklist
1. Loud Like Love
2. Scene Of The Crime
3. Too Many Friends
4. Hold On To Me
5. Rob The Bank
6. A Million Little Pieces
7. Exit Wounds
8. Purify
9. Begin The End
10. Bosco
