Goldfrapp: quality in every single note!

Look at the charts, look at the arts, look at the movies at your multiplex, look at the tele-progs… Wherever you turn it is a variant of ‘creativity’ by remaking, reshaping, re-visualising, re-sounding, re-this and re-that… All these fated guitar-bands that pillage the past, the 1980s in particular of late, that are clogging the Mercury Music Prize shortlist… Have our expectation been so dumbed down that we can’t take in anything new?

That Blunt’s softie-song has ruined our Summer’s listening and thus prevented the best single getting any higher than No.4 a week ago. It makes no difference that it’s Goldfrapp’s greatest single success - because it only proves that mediocrity rules big time. ‘Ooh La La’ is THE single that should have alighted the sky like the biggest fireworks at a New Year’s Eve.

Combining lethal sonics with an irresistible and sing-along phrase, it is a catchy ditty that captures the spirit of T.Rex with matching glamour of the bygone age but teleported deep into the future. It is the track that opens the album with such a force that you wonder what else can they follow it with, can they top it?

The answer is a resounding - yo, man! Of the eleven tracks here, there are another eight potential singles of which, at least, half-a-dozen should be topping the charts! In total, this is an album that is full of delight, goodness, quality of a very individual kind. Alison and [mainly invisible] partner Will Gregory are offering music that is uncompromising, rule breaking, challenging and exciting for anyone who’s had enough with the ‘big boys’’ ploy to rip you off by flogging the recycled crap.

‘Supernature’ is equally informed by Roxy Music, Krautrock, Eurythimcs, Soft Cell, Madonna, Prince [‘Lovely 2 C U’ is entitled the Minneapolis’s most famous artisan’s way, although it was pioneered by Sly and The Family Stone a decade earlier] and takes you on different rides through the enchanted garden of Alison’s imagery.

‘Ride A White Horse’ is disco-noir delivered with such sensuality that, combined with Alison’s preferred off/onstage presentation, makes her the lads’ mags’ favourite. ‘You Never Know’ is so different from ‘Satanic Chic’ like it is from another album by another artist; ‘Fly Me Away’ does what it “states on the tin”, ‘Time Out From The World’ provides another route of this crappy pop predictability… ‘Number 1’ closes the trip into “an electronic, glam cross between Berlin, New York and is north-east Somerset’ [i.e. Bath, where both members live], in Miss Goldfrapp’s words, and it is where they should be.

You can’t quantify quality but, ultimately…

9.6/10
~

Tour dates:

26 August - Rock en Seine, Paris
27 August - TDK Cross Central, Kings Cross, London
03 September - Electronic Picnic, Dublin
02 October - Academy, Bristol
03 October - Dome, Brighton
05 October - EUA, Norwich
06 October - Academy, London
08 October - Academy, Manchester
09 October - Rock City, Nottingham
11 October - University, Leeds
12 October - Academy, Glasgow
14 October - Concert Hall, Perth
15 October - Academy, Newcastle