If, in a couple of years, Goldfrapp’s third album is a fizzing, industrial-pop thunderbolt featuring collaborations with Chicks On Speed, ‘Black Cherry’ will, retrospectively, seem like a logical stepping-stone from their dreamy debut, ‘Felt Mountain’. Choosing the aggressive electro-animal, ‘Train’, as their first single telegraphed a clear departure from previous pastures towards a more rugged, concrete environment.
There are still moments of laidback, orchestrated loveliness, but perhaps Alison thought ‘Felt Mountain’’s beatific aural vistas painted her as too much of a good girl, since the metropolitan forays here are quite overtly sexual, like no knickers under a posh school uniform. One moment Ms Goldfrapp’s playing the doe-eyed innocent, cooing “slow motion u fall like a blossom, way out there on a star” (‘Forever’), then she’s demanding oral gratification, ordering some lucky playmate to “put your dirty angel face between my legs” (‘Twist’).
The problem comes when they can’t decide between the city’s neon thrills, or the country’s verdant pleasures. ‘Black Cherry’ often gets stuck in the suburbs, caught between the pastoral serenity of familiar tunes like ‘Hairy Trees’ and the mechanical, urban buzz of ‘Strict Machine’. Individually, the tracks mostly hold their own but, together, the two faces of Goldfrapp sometimes sit uncomfortably, like a country manor on a housing estate. The two antipodes do occasionally join forces, on ‘Crystalline Green’ and ‘Tiptoe’, which opens in the spare, bleepy manner of an early Warp release, before morphing mid-stream into vales of rolling strings.
What we want from Goldfrapp is an album to file next to Mirwais and the Cocteau Twins, not another inoffensive, middle-class, dinner party soundtrack to follow Dido. What we get is actually neither and their trump card remains Alison’s voice. Although the music is equally important, it’s her idiosyncratic purr that identifies their sound and fills us with fond memories of breathy releases by Intastella and One Dove a decade ago. ‘Black Cherry’ is a record that, like Lemon Jelly’s sophomore effort, ‘Lost Horizons’, consolidates rather than defines but, when Alison gets her honeyed tonsils into the warm duvet-textures of the title track, the world can happily stand still for 5 minutes and we’ll gladly give them another bite.
Ian Joliet @ Playlouder.com
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