On their fourth album “Seventh Tree” Alison Goldfrapp and her production partner Will Gregory have pulled off a drastic artistic about-turn. Veering decisively away from the heady, pulsing dance music that made their name on “Black Cherry” (2003) and “Supernature” (2005), the duo retain but shades of their electronica-tinged past as they head into acoustic, folkier territory. It really is an extraordinary transformation — it would be like Mariah Carey deciding to release an album of Bob Dylan covers, or Arcade Fire deciding to try their hand at disco. The question is: can Goldfrapp pull off folk music as well as they pull off glitzy electro-pop?
Some of the time, they do. In fact, the moments that pay off best are those when Goldfrapp swerve furthest away from their glimmering, bass-heavy dance sound of old. “Clowns,” which opens the album, is not only “Seventh Tree”s best song, it’s also the one that sounds furthest removed from the glammy, Bowie-esque sound that made Goldfrapp’s name. Instead, “Clowns” is a rippling, gorgeous ballad that sounds like the love child of Joni Mitchell and the Cocteau Twins, borrowing acoustic guitar riffs and pop smarts from the former and the crooning, dream-like sound of the latter. Alison Goldfrapp’s voice is especially unrecognisable, her trademark ice-cold, dominatrix demeanour traded in for a more affected, strained, almost Joanna Newsom-esque vocal style.
While “Clowns” may be the most extreme and successful reinvention of Goldfrapp’s sound on the album, it is far from the only one. Also of note is the charmingly rickety “Eat Yourself,” which glides along on dusty samples and another charmingly awkward, delicate vocal performance from Alison Goldfrapp.
More sonically complex — though not much — is the sleek, seductive “Cologne Ceronne Houdini” (that’s a mouthful), one of the few songs on the album to bridge past and present styles, and the only one to do it well. With its stately string hooks, thumping bass-line and silken, sultry vocals, it sounds like it could be an out-take from Goldfrapp’s last album. As a result, despite being a perfectly decent song, it doesn’t really fit into the low-key mood of “Seventh Tree.”
The same goes for “A&E,” the album’s lead single. True, it is an almost perfectly written pop song, a lush mid-tempo ballad with a gorgeous verse melody and a chorus that won’t leave your head for days, but it’s so horrendously catchy compared to the rest of the record that it sticks out a mile. It’s like stumbling upon a Madonna song on a Metallica album. That’s not to say it’s bad — but on a record characterised mainly by tasteful restraint, the jubilantly sweet sugar-rush of “A&E” just doesn’t fit.
Actually, “tastefully restrained” is what Goldfrapp wish their album was, because the biggest weakness of “Seventh Tree” is that the duo too frequently confuses “tastefully restrained” for “blandly boring.” Far gone are the theatrical, intricately detailed sound-scapes of yesteryear, and in its place are more traditional song structures, occasionally repetitious melodies and a markedly restricted sonic palette. As shown above, this bare bones musical style can pay off, as with the dreamy “Clowns,” in which a beautifully ethereal ambience is achieved with just three instruments. But equally often, songs fall just the wrong side of that tricky line between low-key and dreary. Case in point: the droningly repetitive “Caravan Girl,” which is so simplistic it almost sounds like a nursery rhyme. “Run away, we’ll run away you and me” is hardly the most complex or brilliant lyric ever thought up, and in “Caravan Girl” it’s only repeated, you know, like TWENTY TIMES. Equally disappointing is “Little Bird,” which tries to meld Goldfrapp’s past and present styles, without realising that grafting processed, dance-pop vocals over a folk music backdrop sounds really, really silly.
If I sound really damning, I don’t want to, because it’s not that these songs are bad per se — it’s just that they’re not very interesting, and represent a serious step down in musical complexity from Goldfrapp’s last few albums. On their 2003 breakthrough, “Black Cherry,” they showed that dance music need not be repetitive or boring, flawlessly matching swirling, Eno-esque sound tapestries to infectious pop melodies. This brilliant balancing act between experimental and accessible is largely what has made the band so successful, but it’s a trick they haven’t pulled off on “Seventh Tree.” Even so, in this download-a-few-songs-and-screw-the-album age that we live in, “Seventh Tree” is a perfect fit. Download “Clowns,” “Eat Yourself” and “A&E,” drop your jaw at the fact that one sounds like Kate Bush, another sounds like Nina Simone, and the last sounds almost like Sheryl Crow, and revel in the results of a band in the throes of musical reinvention.
"Seventh Tree" released 26 February, 2008 by Mute Records.
Images courtesy of Mute Records and Empire Online.
Published in the Daily Princetonian.
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