I suspect it's somewhat mauvais temps, but let me first sing the praises of the Goldfrapp website-- more specifically its "history" page, which depicts a brilliantly detailed goth nightmare. In a wintry forest, a human with a crudely pasted-on horse head embraces a dog, frost breath issuing from its snout. In the background are two wild boars, and upon contact with your cursor (mouseover, in the HTML parlance) the beasts lift off, rise several feet in the air and proceed to dangle there, irritated. It's not a terribly functional page-- one boar bears an MP3, another a video-- but it's one of the most distinctive I've ever seen, a formidable piece of art in itself.
And the inevitable segue: I wish I could say the same about Goldfrapp or their new album, Black Cherry. The bestial spookiness is there-- disturbing woman-dog hybrids are all over the booklet, and "Wolf Lady sucks my brain" is actually a prominent lyric of the first single-- but that's it. This platter of overproduced come-hither electropop is a polyester successor to the band's silky 2000 debut Felt Mountain.
Continuing the sartorial analogy, vocalist Alison Goldfrapp's purr is still decked out in the sexiest sonic lace money can buy: swooping string passages, languid sampler bleeps, whooshing pads, double bass. These are, by now, pretty rote signifiers of sophistication; while the loungy orchestration of Felt Mountain didn't raise any flags at the time, Black Cherry's oh-so-timely shift to electro beats will make many scream "ambulance chasers!" Add my reluctant voice to that growing chorus.
From the title on down, the new CD tries hard to conjure an ambiance of languid sin-- opium, absinthe, vintage porn-- but that aesthetic is just a few steps from your average bachelor pad with a zebra throw and ceiling mirrors. In fact, that's where copies of this album will inevitably spin, a soundtrack to excruciatingly banal seduction.
The songs themselves, though hard to see through all this velvet fog, are a grab bag of trendy tactics. The first single "Train" is an ancient shuffle, rendered in quantized beats and fuzzy synths. You may recall that Liz Phair used this idea on "Baby Got Going". Goldfrapp's lyrics (opening line: "Plastic brain scar/ I want laser") are probably supposed to bewilder, but instead they annoy. On the mellower end, the title track sounds like early Air, and "Tiptoe"-- the strongest song on the record-- mightily recalls Tori Amos circa From the Choirgirl Hotel. (Pardon the barrage of direct and obvious comparisons, but the songwriting is faceless enough to warrant it.)
It couldn't be more ironic, then, that it's Black Cherry and not its predecessor that's truly broken the Brit duo in the homeland, netting them a Top of the Pops appearance and a place in the charts. The bad news is that the opacity of Goldfrapp's intentions will turn against them: they could be first-class ironists, but that will hardly matter when Alison's soft coos begin to lull customers into buying $200 panties at Agent Provocateur.