Self-pitying is fine, man, if you maybe fling some wit or something in there too, like maybe Morrissey or the Cobain fella. Screw all this talk about "Like a roadkill, I'm paralysed."
If the likes of Teenage Angst focussed on, well, teenage angst, then thank God that most of Placebo's oeuvre deals with material a tad more arresting, i.e., the filthy sexings. The tracklisting on Singles plays out, fittingly enough, like a host of narratives concerning some bed-hopping bohemian beast borne of orgasm and cocaine.
"Eyeholes in a paper bag", Molko muses in the blissful Nancy Boy, "Greatest lay I ever had." "A friend in need's a friend indeed", asserts Pure Morning from the second record, "A friend who bleeds is better."
Those first two albums make up the bulk of the record's first half. Being a singles collection, we don't get, say, the majestically melancholy Burger Queen from Without You I'm Nothing, with its lament for the tragic individual of the title. "Now it takes him all day, just to get an erection", they cooed.
As if to make up for this, though, we get hit with the rather alarming realization that much of what follows this astounding run is, actually, pretty bloody good.
By the time the third album, Black Market Music had arrived, The Duke was off investigating whatever the hell it was I felt like investigating at the time. Possibly some alt.country, maybe Whiskeytown or Cannibal Corpse. All of this means that the tracks from Taste In Men to the final Twenty Years, the second of two new numbers, prove something of a pleasant surprise.
The formula pretty much remained intact throughout, and on occasion the downbeat / sarcastic vocals coupled with gothic / glam tomfoolery can get distastefully predictable. Best to remember though that this is, after all, a singles collection, and not a best of. Of course, the recent Marilyn Manson Best Of was actually a Singles Collection, and we all know how embarrassing that fucking thing was for those of us who believe the kooky sonna bitch actually makes astounding records. Often, singles are the least inventive portions of the record. That's why they get on the radio.
So, then, after the duet with Bowie on Without You I'm Nothing, which surly types might judge to be a pointedly fitting title for the team-up, The Duke wandered off into pastures new. These pastures, whilst certainly still green for the most part, and fit for any amount of bovine to be chewing on without risk of gut-explosion, do, however, tend to look very similar to the ones we've just left. Whether this means that the farmer and his team of landscapers got fed up and just did the same thing again and again is open to discussion. Perhaps he just realised that the fields were pretty much perfect as they were. No point screwing things up with rivers or rockeries or such superfluous cack.
Article comments
1 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
time check
2 - Eric Olsen
thyme Czech
(great review, Duker, I actuallly didn't know all that much about Placebo, though I have an album or two)