Placebo - Battle For The Sun
Let’s face it, Placebo have never been much of an ‘uplifting’ kind of band, and are more a soundtrack to committing suicide than a party anthem. Why then, do we find them so utterly compelling?
Their latest album, Battle For The Sun, is no more exciting than watching paint dry, but somehow it’s controlled and delicate pace in each song is completely different to anything we’ve heard from the lads before.
Let's face it, Brian Molko is the King of delivering goth-like angst through lyric after lyric of nasal whine, but on this album, it's like someone has left him out in the sun for too long as he has a new optimism towards life and the album *shock horror* adds a little bit of diversity to the depressing stuff this trio usually rolls off.
Lead single from the album, For What It’s Worth, is what initially made me sit up and take notice of this band again when I first hear it a couple of months ago. It managed to establish a difference between Placebo and Muse, who I constantly used to get mixed up as a teenager. It’s a great single, and you can actually imagine Brian’s porcelain skin cracking as smile as he careers through the highs an lows of this hit.
Elsewhere though, it’s much of the same Placebo slow and precise deliverance, with title track Battle For The Sun and closer, Kings Of Medicine being the two stand out tracks here for me. Although, if I’m honest, we’ve had this CD on three times on the FemaleFirst CD player so far, and with each listen I seem to like it more and more.
So, in all, if you’re a Placebo fan, I think you’ll be pretty happy with this offering, although if you want something to bring a bit of sunshine into your life, I’d probably stick with Same Difference.
FemaleFirst - Ruth Harrison
Tagged in Placebo