Review:

on 2011-08-03 CharlesMartel Said:

Placebo have made a habit of producing thick, dark music which combines post-punk, alternative rock, goth and glam into a style which is pretty difficult for others to replicate. And just to make sure that replicating Placebo is a near impossible task, Placebo are fronted by a vocalist whose style engenders extremes of opinion. Love it or loathe it, Brian Molko's voice is pretty unique. Generally speaking, I like the voice, but it does take some time getting used to and, in all honesty, only suits certain tracks, and generally those are the slower and denser ones. Furthermore, I cannot take the voice for too long before it begins to grate. So Placebo albums, which tend in any case to be quite long, for me, tend to tail off towards the end as my patience and tolerance begins to flag.

Take for instance the album's stand out track, "Follow the Cops Back Home". Quite apart from the (post G20 riots) appealing theme of following individual police officers home and robbing their houses, the song gradually builds into dense layers of guitars which many a shoegaze band would have died for. It was a tactic successfully tried with "Without You I'm Nothing" almost ten years earlier and it still works. This, slow, almost drone-like effect compliments Molko's voice perfectly. He is less successful on "Drag" which, in addition to being faster paced, and therefore less suitable for the Placebo style of music, has a lyric which sounds as if it has been borrowed from the script of one of those appalling one-joke buddy movies with the cool kid and the geek becoming friends in spite of the opposition of their respective social circles.

"Meds" then combines both highs and lows in one album, not unusual in that. But this is an album with a theme running through it. Call it what you want, fixation, obsession, addiction, but many of the tracks are themed around this emotion. The aforementioned "Drag" is all about obsessive adoration: "Follow the Cops Back Home" steps into the mind of a revenge obsessed stalker: "Song to Say Goodbye" deals with the consequences of drug addiction: while the title track is pretty self-explanatory - controlling behaviour with drugs. It is not an easy concept to handle, let alone wrap around an entire album, but Placebo do not a bad job of it here.

It is fortunate therefore that the music by and large matches the rather depressing theme of the album. Various epithets could be thrown at it but perhaps the most appropriate is oppressive. Placebo may trace some of their musical lineage back to Ziggy Stardust, but apart from the tragic premature end of that great fictional rocker, it is the more brooding elements of goth which springs to the fore. This is not an album to listen to on a bright sunny day, or when you spring to life, full of optimism. It will bring you down. Had the band personalised the tales within, it could have been amongst the most depressing albums of all time.

It is perhaps this aspect which holds the album back from a higher rating. It could have been more than it is, but it is almost as if the band pulled back from that final step at the last moment, perhaps fearing a commercial bomb (But then I could hardly see anything on "Meds" as commercial). Perhaps they felt they could not take that final step. Whatever the reason, this is a potentially great album which only manages to be good.
Rating: 6/10