Review Summary: an idfk/5
Oh Placebo. You're hard to love and you're harder to hate. If nothing else you're definitely unpredictable, for better or for worse. Battle For The Sun was a mess, and then B3EP seemed to at least pick up some of the pieces, so were we to expect a return to form? B3EP came out just one year before so the signs were good... right?
Cue first single,
Too Many Friends, and that infamous line "My computer thinks I'm gay/So I threw that piece of junk away/On the Champs-Élysées/As I was walking home". Oh dear. It's bad enough that this line is delivered over a super-melodramatic piano line but what even is this? What does the Champs-Élysées have to do with anything? Could he sound any more pretentious? Brian himself even sounds vaguely embarrassed performing it. I can appreciate the message the song's trying to put out but outright stating it in the line "...All people do all day/Is stare into a phone" just makes it feel like a clumsy attempt at social commentary, and not exactly an original one.
It gets worse though, as
Rob The Bank demonstrates. I quote: "Rob the bank then pick your nose/Rob the bank/Paint a picture of a swastika". Subtle just doesn't quite describe it. It seems like this one's some heavy handed political statement involving robbing the banks of countries such as Leichtenstien, but then the chorus goes "Take me home and make love", so colour me baffled. You have to like how non-specific said love making is though. This song may have been half decent given the album's lack of good honest rockers but with lyrics like that? Pass.
Other than the hilariously over-telegraphed delivery of the words "...my heart" at the end of
every single line of the verses to
A Million Little Pieces, there's thankfully not much else to truly cringe out to, but there's songs that suffer for doing the exact opposite thing, i.e. in just being bland and barely memorable. The title track is probably amazing if your two favourite words in the English language are "breathe" and "believe", and it's decent enough with a nice summery feel to start the album off with, but it takes too long to get to the point. Besides that, it just sounds like
up-tempo major key Placebo rock song #142, and B3EP's titular opener/this song's predecessor in that respect was much catchier. Elsewhere,
Purify wants to be sexy but it just sort of isn't at all, thanks to more questionable lyricisms, so that's that one.
I don't know if B3EP and Loud Like Love were recorded in the same sessions, but the sad part is, the best of both would have culminated in a pretty solid LP overall.
Exit Wounds pulls off an intriguing electronica-tinged intro and shifts into the guitar driven parts effectively.
Scene Of The Crime has a great atmosphere to it, sinister, brooding, slow building and with a damn good chorus to match. Another dark, moody cut in
Hold On To Me showcases vulnerability in Brian's voice that draws you in to its synth pad backdrop, and the surprise key-change actually works, to the point where the spoken word outro actually becomes tolerable. Too often the production feels unsubtle and lacking in any sort of atmosphere, smacking you in the face with overly stark vocals, synth solos and handclaps wherever it damn well pleases, so when tracks like these show up, it's such a welcome change.
And then of course, because this album isn't enough of a confusing and disjointed mess, Placebo rolls out the last two tracks... and they're fantastic. Not even just fantastic by comparison to what you had to wade through to get here, but up there with the best songs in their career.
Begin The End is very much a slow builder, guitars threatening to explode with repressed emotion before falling back in on itself repeatedly with a genuinely beautiful vocal performance. The fact that it never quite releases the feelings that build makes it all the more powerful in an almost exasperating kind of way.
It's hard not to be moved by this song's 6 minute length, so it's almost a shame that the finale,
Bosco, strives to completely out-do it, not just in length but in sheer unadulterated beauty. Boy does it succeed too, making even
Pierrot The Clown from Meds seem stoic. It's such a perfect release for all the emotion built up in the track before it, dragging it out to agonising lengths and letting it all just crash down all over you in slow motion in a sea of strings and piano, by way of another gorgeous, painfully honest piece of singing from Mr Molko.
Obviously this has been out a while now and I thought writing about it would bring some kind of closure to all the mixed emotions it has brought on the occasions I dared play it but I still don't know how to feel. It's possibly the most frustrating listening experience I've ever had, not least because of how deep a connection I feel with this band and how important they've been to me through nearly half my life. However weak their recent material has become, I still can't just write them off as a lost cause and move on because just when it seems like game over, Placebo go and pull off one of the best, most moving album endings in recent memory. What a shame the album it ends might as well have consisted of just about anything for all the quality control and cohesiveness/lack thereof on display.
I'm giving it a 2.5 but honestly this is just a formality because if it were an option, this would get an idfk/5.
