Goldfrapp’s seventh album seems fascinated by the subject of transformation. A song inspired by a documentary about transgender children – “become the one you know you are,” urges its chorus – rubs shoulders with a song in which a man turns into a tiger. It’s not entirely clear whether this second change is literal or metaphorical, although Alison Goldfrapp sounds keen on the idea, either way. “Magnificent … primordial,” she coos, like an admiring judge examining a competitor at Crufts, or whatever the equivalent of Crufts is for men who’ve turned into tigers.
Of course, Goldfrapp’s devotees would say transformation is an entirely fitting topic for the duo to essay: there have certainly been some dramatic stylistic shifts in their career. While her partner, Will Gregory, lurked unseen in the shadows, Alison Goldfrapp seemed to turn in fairly short order from a purveyor of cinematic ballads into a woman whose live shows involved playing a theremin with her crotch while looking like a besequinned Nazi air hostess, and later from that into a bucolic folkie in a harlequin outfit.
But the leap from the electropop of 2005’s Supernature to its pastoral-acoustic follow-up, Seventh Tree, seemed to finally define the parameters of Goldfrapp’s sound: rather than metamorphosise again, they settled into a comfortable rhythm, flipping between the two modes with each subsequent album. Their last, Tales of Us, was rich with strings and acoustic guitars; therefore it must be time to break out the synthesisers again.
And so it proves. A number of tracks on Silver Eye, including the single Anymore, are audibly cut from the same glittery cloth as their most influential album, 2003’s Black Cherry. Plenty of other people had the idea of melding sleazy electronics with glam-rock beats – you could trace it back through 90s trio Add N To (X) and ultimately to the Human League’s 1980 cover of Gary Glitter’s Rock’n’Roll Part One – but it was Goldfrapp who alchemised it into pop gold. It’s a sound that has since turned up everywhere in mainstream pop from Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl to Kanye West’s Black Skinhead.
This time around, the synthesisers grind, the beats thud and the lyrics of Anymore gasp: “Give me your love, make me a freak.” The problem isn’t that Anymore or Systemagic or Everything Is Never Enough are bad songs exactly, rather that they’re not strong enough to overcome a sense of diminishing returns: what once seemed striking and hugely influential now feels a bit commonplace, an idea Goldfrapp already explored pretty exhaustively during the playing-a-theremin-with-your-crotch era, and which umpteen other artists have subsequently helped to make ubiquitous.
But elsewhere, Silver Eye choses to move on, if not with quite the kind of unanticipated left turn that once seemed to be Goldfrapp’s speciality. The pace slows, the temperature drops and the mood turns alternately dreamlike and ominous. The atmosphere is not unlike that conjured up on Seventh Tree or Tales of Us, but this time, the arrangements rest on electronic drones: among the album’s cast list lurks sometime Björk collaborator Bobby Krlic, better known as the Haxan Cloak, very much a go-to guy if omnious electronic droning is what you’re after. It feels like a conscious attempt to meld the two polarities of Goldfrapp’s sound, and it works: closer Ocean prickles with chilly malevolence; Zodiac Black finds Goldfrapp’s voice lost amid cavernous drums and bursts of scourging white noise; there’s a drowsy, hypnagogic quality about Faux Suede Drifter.
Silver Eye’s best track, Moon in Your Mouth, really does feel like Goldfrapp tying togther all the different threads of their career: the cinematic quality of their debut album, Felt Mountain; the synthesisers and sex of Black Cherry and Supernature; the Wicker Man-styled preoccupations of Seventh Tree. It’s an absolutely beautiful song that also raises the question: what next? Silver Eye sounds like Gregory and Goldfrapp eking out the last drops of inspiration from a musical template that’s been in place for a decade now, with mixed results: sometimes it doesn’t yield anything; sometimes familiar tricks, neatly rearranged, still work. Its highlights will do for now – there’s great stuff here – but it’s hard not to compare it to the days when you never quite knew what a Goldfrapp album would contain, or to hope they opt for another dramatic stylistic shift in future: it’s better to embody the idea of transformation than to sing about it.
