Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 13/03/06
Label: Virgin

The title, a wry inevitability. The songs, bruise-livid tales of drug mistrials and tribulations, as inevitably as Nick Cave serves up murder and biblicality to rounds of broadsheet applause. And, improbably, ten years on - a decade ago being the farthest away from "now" that music usually gets - here Placebo are. Thriving. Not only are they substantial unit-shifters in a world bigger than Arctic Monkeys even have maps for, but they're also, in their alternately frigid and frisky post-post-punkisms, more of-the-moment than ever.

Strange, isn't it? Not to mention annoying as hell for the blokey boys' brigades who never forgave Brian Molko his unsettling looks, never mind that provocatively nasal, un-English, un-bloke voice. Frankly, the naysayers are now left with little in the way of argument, continued success being the best revenge for a frontman who clearly always fancied a little. Years after Richey Manic and Brett Anderson and all those fellow suitors for the tribe of eye-linered skinny bodies are gone or forgotten, the perhaps slightly overlong "Meds" is as sleek and assured as anything the trio have done.

In a set wriggling with sharp-toothed life and devastatingly effective swarms of clanking, frizzling FX, the strong suits here are the hammeringly uptempo tracks, as stingingly arresting as anything from the "Nancy Boy" era. Hungriest among them are the title track with its jittery acoustic guitar line and Kills vocalist Alison Mosshart's cooingly deadly counterpoint; the '90s guitars and giddy urgency of "Because I Want You"; Stefan Olsdal's Peter Hook-inspired bass driving a heady "Drag"; the carnival organ and rollercoaster propulsion of "Infra-Red".

Even the chilly piano and underplayed Michael Stipe cameo of "Broken Promise", which more timid souls would have left as a bittersweet but staid vignette, makes way for Molko's most passionate vocal delivery in years. And the ace in the hole, probably, is Flood's mix, unerringly drenching "Space Monkey" and "Post Blue" with slitheringly off-kilter Depeche Mode menace; adding a cabaret lilt to the Jacques Brel-isms of "In The Cold Light Of Morning"; bleaching a drum machine driven "Pierrot The Clown" into a despairingly lovely photo-negative of a Morrissey lament.

There are, of course, entirely too many references to unsupervised self-medication, from the first track all the way to "Song To Say Goodbye"'s overdose-verité. There's also perhaps too much body-dysmorphia fetishisation in the CD artwork, which features a rather underfed naked girl. But, as the nearest kohl-eyed teenager with a gut-level connection to deadpan lines about "unhappy birthdays" will assure you, Placebo's aural drugs still work.

    by Jennifer Nine