Black Market Music

Placebo return with an album adorned with all the attractively-packaged, black-eyed glamour that the band are famous for. It’s a formula that should have grown tired by now, but Black Market Music still has a surprising vitality. Dispersed among the stormy guitar-scratched angst-fests like ‘Taste In Men’ and ‘Slave To The Wage’ (with its tasty sampling of Pavement’s ‘Texas Never Whispers’) are tender, straining slow songs like ‘Blue American’ and ‘Narcoleptic’ that, while sagging under the weight of their author’s carefully-posed neuroses, are deeply effective nonetheless.

Molko doesn’t deviate from his own standard lyrical vocabulary, similar in a way to that which Suede’s Brett Anderson habitually employs, homo-eroticism and heroin chic being staple subjects for both. Black Market Music is branded with the same recurrent motifs, and drips with words like “black”, “blood” and “broken”, plus the ubiquitous sex and drug references.

In ‘Commercial For Levi’ he simultaneously glorifies this sado-narcotic-abusive lifestyle, while acting in the role of an old battle-scarred roue, warning impressionable youth about its dangers, in a ‘been there, done that, but you wouldn’t survive it’ sort of way.

Some of the lyrics seem somewhat cringe-making on paper, i.e. “You’re the one who’s always choking Trojan/ you’re the one whose shower’s always golden”, but, in a quiet ballad without any intermittent guitar histrionics, Brian’s monochromed whine carries it off beautifully.

The only track that doesn’t quite work is ‘Spite And Malice’ featuring a rap by Justin Warfield. Despite its potentially-explosive refrain of “Dope. Guns. Fucking in the streets. Revolution,” the subtle air of menace it tries to build up falls uncomfortably flat.

Pretentious though Placebo are, their music thrives on a kind of magnificent artifice, which could easily descend to the level of gruesome self parody, but hopefully should be sustainable for a while longer.