The way Placebo polarise people, one would think them a much bigger and more ubiquitous band. Maybe it’s the Pan-androgyne figure cut by Brian Molko, maybe the pitch of his voice or the accent of indeterminate origin. Maybe people just don’t like his hair.
Nevertheless, from their debut right up to the Best Of Once More With Feeling, the trio have proved themselves an impressive singles band.
Meds – and how very Placebo is that, an even split between Elizabeth Wurtzel and Kurt Cobain – is their fifth album, and the sound of a band straining to slip their own skin. They’ve got a whole new set of musical ordinances going on (the sound is indisputably lush and muscular in a post-industrial kinda way) but still only two tunes: the one that throbs with dum-dum basslines and Sonic guitar swathes, and the slow spacey one with the Joy Division keyboard washes and heavy delay.
Therein lies the problem. Placebo are better musicians than songwriters. Meds teems with ideas, but those ideas are hitched to tunes which conform to a limited formula. Molko tends to rob stock lyrical hooks rather than inventing his own (titles like ‘Space Monkey’ or lines like, “Your needle and your damage done”) and his idea of a chorus often involves repeating the title four times with a few minor phrasing variations (‘Meds’, ‘Follow The Cops Back Home’). A shrewder producer would probably have arrested these tunes at the demo stage and ordered the band back to the compositional drawing board in order to rustle up a couple more pre-choruses and middle-eights.
That said, there’s a lot to savour, not least the self-mocking ‘Pierrot The Clown’ and the melancholic ‘Song To Say Goodbye’. Indeed, the album’s best song occurs outside the confort zone of driving 4/4 and in the unfamiliar – for them – meter of a waltz. ‘Cold Light Of Morning’ is the lament of a ravaged satyr who awakes from the horrors to snack on a whore’s breakfast, catches his reflection in the mirror and sees he’s become more goat than man. It’s a Dorian Gray moment that transcends the band and could become a secret standard for anyone from Antony to Mark Lanegan.
Meds will satisy the gallery, but if Placebo are to avoid inhabiting ever-decreasing circles, they need to investigate a new melodic vocabulary and indulge in less fussing and fixing in the mix.