Placebo - Meds

There’s always been a hermetic correspondence between Placebo’s image and their sound; a kind of “as within, so without” connection linking their brand of glam rock and their well-practiced airs as gothic gutter punks. Painstakingly manicured and carefully arranged with equal amounts of mascara and jarring sound and peopled with a rogues’ gallery of outcasts and misfits, addicts and rejects, their albums are elaborate exercises in orchestrated entropy. For its part, while Meds does make some overtures toward the rock’n’roll mainstream by sporting a more stripped down sound and catchier choruses, in reality it’s little different from the band’s previous offerings. From the spanking acoustic pulse of the guitar on “Meds” to the terminal strains of “Song to Say Goodbye,” the album is another ornate musical tableaux with enough heavy dollops of lyrical downers to make the even the most abysmally depressed reassess their mood. That’s all well and good, but for a band that attempts to sound the darker hollows of human existence, Placebo sounds pretty tame and more than a little ridiculous. Frontman Brian Molko’s nasal stylings are as distinctive as ever, but his bitter sense of humor seems to have left him, and the references to drug dependency, alienation, and loneliness that litter his tales reek more of adolescent melodrama than of genuine desperation, something which is enhanced by his overwrought lyrics. Grotesque, brooding, and more than a little stiff, like the album, they won’t just leave you blue, they’ll leave you blue in the face. [www.placeboworld.co.uk]