One need look no further than the tiny imperfect form of Brian Molko and his band's darkly thrilling noise - yes, still - to be reminded of the vagaries of critical fashion in music. And that those vagaries are overwhelmingly rubbish.
If critical opprobrium has lately been Placebo's lot, it's got little to do with the records that followed their face-slappingly confident debut. Nor, indeed, has it much to do with whether Brian Molko is a) a nice man or b) putting on some kind of drugs/sexual orientation-related act. And incidentally, if we started banishing the bad men and pose-pullers from our record collections, we'd be left with eighty-seven metres of empty shelves and three Martin Stephenson CDs.
What it's really got to do with, of course, is rugby-scrum groupthink and a large collective shudder at the embarrassment of having gawped like rubes and screamed like girls when Molko turned up in 1996: a travel-sized lord of genderbent misrule with an irresistible string of black-varnish-and-curare-tipped singles and a defiantly weird-sounding voice.
And no one likes to remember screaming like a girl.
In the meantime, and while contemplating a fourth, impressively focused Placebo album that boasts several great songs and few ropey ones, it's amusing to note that since we last heard from the trio, a substantial tranche of the musical Zeitgeist has crept back toward a certain bruised-black, glacial corner. As the big boys currently screaming like girls over Interpol can attest. Funnily enough, it's the place Placebo has always inhabited: essentially, Eighties post-punk in all its bleak yearning glory. Indeed, if 'Sleeping With Ghosts' is a "contemporary"-sounding album, it's less to do with an increased reliance on arctic keyboards as it is to do with fashion catching-up with Brian.
Sound-wise, 'Sleeping With Ghosts' is pretty much flawless. You'd be hard-pressed to fault the tensile drive of the chorus-bassline-driven arrangements, or the band's ability to process 'Songs Of Faith And Devotion'-era Depeche Mode, Joy Division/New Order's elegiac swoons, The Cure's plangent guitarscapes, Bauhaus' spiky malice and Gary Numan's mechanik heart, and come up with something that breathes on its own authority. Admittedly, if you look closely, you'll spot the odd flaw: the drifty-synthed title track has some damp-squib anti-government sentiments and a whiff of Robert Miles, and the beat-driven 'English Summer Rain' and piano-pretty 'Centrefold' remind that Molko's voice is better suited to provocation than balladry. Oh, and 'Plasticine' is a bit lumpy.
On the other hand, there are four moments of dead-on exhilaration: a taut, propulsive, heavyweight instrumental opener, 'Bulletproof Cupid'; the rubbery, S&M-referencing, drop-dead-pop-chorusing 'This Picture'; the Iggy-circa-'The Passenger' whiplash charisma of album standout 'The Bitter End', and the stripped-back throb of a spiteful, catchy 'Second Sight'.
If I didn't know I was six years too late for it to be allowed, all four would have me screaming like a girl.
