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|
| Date |
August 12 |
| Type |
Paper |
| Source |
The Guardian's Friday review |
| Title |
Goldfrapp, Supernature |
| Country |
UK |
| Journalist/Photographer |
Dorian Lynskey |
| Text |
She's dominatrix, debutante and dancing queen all in one. Dorian Lynskey can't resist Goldfrapp.
Last week, Gyles Brandreth gave an entertaining account of his first attempt to become a Conservative MP. Fresh out of university and bursting with his own brilliance, he bounded into the office of Tory Iain Macleod, only to receive this brusque but invaluable advice: "You're far too young. Go out - learn something, achieve something, and then come back in 10 years, not before."
Macleod died in 1970 - otherwise he might have made a useful A&R man, urging fresh-faced wannabes to learn something of the world outside the recording studio. Whereas rock and Didoesque MOR are sympathetic to late developers, the Logan's Run policy that informs pure pop tends to favour stage school-pampered charisma vacuums. In 2005, the archetypal British pop star is Rachel Stevens, who has some of the best songs money can buy, yet the personality of a boiled egg.
Alison Goldfrapp followed a very different route. She first appeared in 1994, lending ethereal, wordless ululations to songs by Orbital and Tricky, but took six years to release a record under her own name, with camera-shy studio wizard Will Gregory. Felt Mountain's mysterious trip-hop was a modest word-of-mouth success but sounded tentative. Goldfrapp only found her/their metier on 2003's Black Cherry, which forged a link between the Kit Kat Club, Studio 54 and the deep, dark forests of the Brothers Grimm. A decade since that first Orbital record (Macleod would have approved), she sounds electric with confidence. Her album covers speak volumes: she's a demure hillwalker on Felt Mountain, a debauched Little Red Riding Hood on Black Cherry, and now a half-naked nightclub siren sprouting a peacock's tail. At this rate, Goldfrapp's fourth album will have to be wrapped in a brown paper bag.
In its sound and influences, this picks up where Black Cherry left off, but whereas that album smacked of corroded innocence, Supernature fizzes like spacedust on your tongue. From its sitcom-saucy title down, Ooh La La is a brazen hussy of a single. Half reprise of previous electro-glam singles such as Strict Machine and Train, half lip-licking homage to Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky, a song that not even the combined efforts of Gareth Gates and the Kumars could wither, Ooh La La sounds like a proper, populist hit, destined to be enjoyed by people who don't use words like "electro-glam", and filed alongside Kylie rather than Fischerspooner.
The video is equally revealing - a loving tribute to that halcyon era when people actually watched Top of the Pops (hard to imagine, I know) and David Bowie or Marc Bolan seemed as strange as aliens. Goldfrapp treasures the idea of pop stardom as an opportunity to re-imagine yourself from the ground up, so it's small wonder that Supernature's musical lodestars are glam rock and synth pop, both of which have noble traditions of allowing arty misfits entry to the charts. In fact, the synthesiser sounds on Koko and Beautiful are so familiar that if I were Gary Numan I would install new locks. Of course, electroclash tapped this seam three years ago, but it was too fixated on blank ennui and icy, impermeable surfaces. Will Gregory, however, can make synthesisers buck and sweat, or spiral and soar, as opulent as orchestras. On U Never Know, Goldfrapp's chameleonic voice (now Debbie Harry, now Siouxsie Sioux, now a kohl-eyed angel) seems to merge ecstatically with the machines. Even though she writes lyrics these days, she seems most liberated when she shrugs off language in favour of an "uh-huh" or "na na na"; at the end of Koko, she sounds like a child trilling softly to herself.
Goldfrapp has described Supernature as "a place to take part in fortnightly disco seances". Where her obsessions with dance music and fairy tales intertwine are the ideas of metamorphosis and flight from the humdrum. Time Out From the World and the immaculate Fly Me Away are hymns to escape, while the fantasy that Goldfrapp voices in Ride a White Horse echoes not just a knight in shining armour but also Bianca Jagger's famous entrance to Studio 54. She makes nightclubbing seem sexy and exotic again, which is not something you can say of DJ Sammy.
To be honest, the woman who played a motion-sensitive synthesizer with her crotch at last year's Glastonbury, and got the lyrics "Put your dirty angel face between my legs and knicker lace" into the Top 40 with Twist, could make Gardener's Question Time seem sexy and exotic. Few lines here don't sound like entendres of either the double or single variety, but Goldfrapp's sexuality comes in many more varieties than the standard panting and writhing model. She's a playful dominatrix on Ooh La La, a dissolute debutante on Ride a White Horse and a dreamy romantic on Fly Me Away.
It's the romantic who closes Supernature with the devastatingly tender Number 1, breathing: "You're my favourite moment, you're my Saturday." Supernature is pretty Saturday itself: a brash, beautiful celebration of love and dancing that puts Kylie and Madonna on the back foot. It was worth the wait. |
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