Placebo - Battle For The Sun
Placebo have returned. Three years on from the rather patchy ‘Meds’ they’ve hooked up with Tool desk jockey Dave Bottrill and recruited a new drummer in Steve Forrest. One or the other, or even the combination, seems to have given the band a fresh impetus, ‘Battle For The Sun’ is a wholly more satisfying listen than either of the last two offerings.
The template is essentially the same, angsty lyrics sung in Brian Molok’s nasal vibrato, which seems to have got even more vibrato here, set over trashy, trebbley guitars, but they seem to be going at it with a tad more vim and vigour than of late.
There are occasions now that Moloko’s trash sex inflected lyrics seem a little inappropriate, like an old queen who refuses to believe they’ve lost it and still hangs around the dancefloor in hope, it feels that maybe it’s time to leave those teen bedroom scenes behind and move on to a more grown up place, but its worked for them so far so I guess they feel no pressing need for change. It’s just that in a number of places I was able to confidently predict the second half of a number of the couplets.
The album opens briskly enough with ‘Kitty Litter’ and ‘Ashtray Heart’, a prime example of what I was talking about above, but doesn’t really get in to full swing until the title track, a slow burner that cuts loose, the pounding ‘For What It’s Worth’, which is classic Placebo in their pomp with a massively catchy chorus that I caught myself humming hours later, and ‘Devil In The Details’, another classic of the Placebo oeuvre, the taut, tense slow one that suddenly explodes in to a massive epic.
Forrester seems to have added a metronomic tension that fits beautifully with the atmosphere of the band as a whole and Bottrill has added some space and depth to the mix in which to give the band room to breathe a little more than on past records and in places really produces some sonic fireworks.
There’s not much here that deviates from the tried and tested path, although ‘Julien’ plays with a kind of disco-y sound, but there are some cracking songs on this record. As someone who has followed the band ever since ‘Nancy Boy’ and hoped in vain for the last ten years they would recapture the glory of ‘Without You I’m Nothing’ it’s encouraging. Whilst it does not scale those heights it’s probably as high as they’ve been since. Probably not a record that’s going to convert a huge number of new fans but it will definitely please their legions of fanatical followers.
Top Tracks: For What It’s Worth', ‘Devil In The Details’.