Placebo ‘Never Let Me Go’ Review: alternative rock vets sound reinvigorated on first new (and very topical) album in nearly 10 years.
It’s been almost a decade since Placebo put out a studio album (2013’s Loud Like Love). Fans could be forgiven for wondering if the band had splintered or ran out of juice, because even its members felt burnt out after years on the live circuit celebrating their legacy in lieu of new material.
I thought it all got a little bit too commercial, around that period – the retrospective period, frontman Brian Molko said in a recent press release: The whole enterprise was commercial, rather than artistic one, and I guess we reacted against that. I’m like, ‘fuck this, the next record is gonna be about the pain of the world!’ The silent scream that is everywhere – that’s what interests me.
And from that manifesto the group have emerged with Never Let Me Go, which finds the duo of Molko and multi-instrumentalist Stefan Olsdal reignited, resulting in their best album since 2003’s Sleeping With Ghosts. And in its own quirky way, it’s an album of protest songs at their most personal.
Like Ghosts, Never Let Me Go is augmented by electronics and experimentation with new sounds, as Molko explains: I have a major boredom problem. If we were going back to the exact same process, I figured that I might get bored kind of quickly. So, I decided to do everything backwards, just to keep the process interesting for me – to approach everything from the opposite angle.
And it’s that reverse engineered approach that leads to moments like opener Forever Chemicals, where Molko uses an experimental drum machine loop that sounds truly otherworldly, perfectly framing discontented lyrics like:
It’s all good
When nothing matters
It’s all good
When no one cares
It’s all good
When I feel nothing
It’s all good
When I’m not there
Single Beautiful James is the diametrically opposed follow-up, a beatific, soaring, cinematic track that is one of the band’s most direct and potent love songs to date, although in a recent interview, Molko left it open to interpretation: Who is James to you? And is James even a man? These are questions I’m not going to answer, these are questions I want people to ask themselves.
As stated earlier, the album dives headfirst into the social issues that have made the past few years a shitshow, whether its longing for intimacy during lockdown (Hugz, one of the album’s heaviest songs), the erosion of privacy (the haunting Surrounded By Spies), or Try Better, Next Time, which posits that Earth will survive mankind, but not the other way around.
That song is also the most classic Placebo song on the album, hearkening back to the sugar rush anthems on their 1998 smash album Without You I’m Nothing. It’s an earworm that is hard to dislodge.
Happy Birthday In The Sky ‘s gentle dynamics recall the xx, with some of Molko’s best vocals, punctuating a melancholic melody that the singer said When I say, happy birthday to people who aren’t with us anymore, it communicates the kind of heartbreak that we’re really, really good at communicating I think. And it’s an apt statement for a song that is as gorgeous as it is sorrowful.
The Prodigal sees the band shift gears, employing an emotive string section inspired by The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, while the hilariously titled Sad White Reggae channels Depeche Mode at their most infectious. And Chemtrails uses a riff recalling Nirvana’s All Apologies, as Molko sings of escaping modern society and retreating into nature.
The album loses a bit of steam in the final stretch, with several downtempo numbers that blend together, but closer Fix Yourself sees the duo ending on a high note, a Goth self-help ballad for avoiding the emotional and cultural landmines we’re seemingly always in danger of detonating these days.
I wanted to capture the confusion of what it’s like to be alive today, Molko says of Never Let Me Go: the feeling of being lost, always walking in a labyrinth, continuously being overwhelmed by information and opinions.
While this is apt, Placebo, ever the outsiders, are still too stubborn to embrace defeatism. And Never Let Me Go, like all their best work, still leaves a path for the listener to reach sonic transcendence, even as the world crumbles around us.
