Contrary to popular belief, it's quite hard for pop music to be genuinely sexy. Or at least, it's hard for pop music to be sexy when it tries to be so desperately.
Witness the second album by Goldfrapp, ten tracks whose wheezing electronics, polymorphous imagery and general huskiness have a clear purpose: to be erotic, albeit in a futuristic and slightly mysterious way. "Wolf lady sucks my brain," observes Alison Goldfrapp in 'Train', amidst frantic signifiers of sauce. Forty-five minutes of 'Black Cherry', and vividly deviant dreams should be assured.
That's the theory, anyway. Predictably, the truth is at once more complex and more mundane. Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory's first album, 'Felt Mountain' from 2000, presented a world of cinematic trip-hop that was suggestive but never exactly disruptive. Seized upon by a scrupulously tasteful generation feeling abandoned by Portishead, it sold half a million copies, a discreetly exotic soundtrack to fundamentally ordinary lives.
One suspects their usefulness as background music became rather galling to Goldfrapp. Certainly, 'Black Cherry' aggressively pushes itself in your face. The willowy, string-smothered ballads have been dumped, for the most part. Instead, the album's dominant mode is the kind of strenuous, blunt '80s robo-disco thrust back into the cultural milieu by the electroclash boom of last year. Given that much of that music - chiefly the preposterous white elephants of Fischerspooner - had little impact beyond metropolitan fashion students, Goldfrapp's appropriation of it is undoubtedly canny. Here is the zeitgeist, theoretically transgressive art, presented to the mainstream by a comfortingly familiar figure.
There are, though, problems. For a start, the self-conscious sexy robot music of 'Strict Machine' is a lot funnier than it is sensuous. There's no doubting Goldfrapp and Gregory's skills at teasing pant, grind and squelch from their old synths and new computers. But this is a kind of music that represents sexuality as something clumsy and hackneyed, no matter how much bestial imagery from her old Angela Carter books is planted in it by Goldfrapp.
Her vocals, too, are fine in an aesthetic, detached way. But there's a curious lack of emotional engagement - the same problem which bedevilled the more romantic soundscapes of 'Gold Mountain'. Nevertheless, the best songs on this cunning, efficient, frequently daft and fractionally disappointing album are the ones which sound most like the misty reveries of that debut. 'Hairy Trees', 'Forever' (like Kate Bush, cryogenically frozen) and the title track all have a sort of whirling, baroque atmosphere that suits Goldfrapp much better than the dancefloor angles she tries to throw elsewhere.
That's the irony at the heart of 'Black Cherry': Goldfrapp's music is much more eroticised and subversive when it affects to be coy, rather than raunchy. Bugger.
