Placebo - Loud Like Love

When our house signed up for the internet in 2005 (I know!) I was thrust into the world of music downloading and the ease with which new bands are recommended to me. A friend of mine at the time was something of an emo girl and - amongst other bands I'd never heard of yet, in my world of Top of the Pops and Now! CDs, like Tool, A Perfect Circle and AFI - thrust upon me Placebo. Since then it's been a bit tricky to justify loving them: their heyday, of course, was very much in the 90s and that whole decade's love of genderbending angsty rock, and today...well, they're putting out albums like this.

I actually enjoyed 2009's Music of the Sun. It was obviously everything from their back catalogue condensed into a poppier, maturer sound, but considering the internet age has now destroyed any allure and word-of-mouth quality about bands like Placebo - who critics have written off from the start as contrived and marketed towards teens desperate to appear alternative and ambiguous, quite unfairly - it was a little bit naive for anyone to expect anything as gripping or novel as Nancy Boy or Pure Morning.

The problem with Loud Like Love is that it doesn't show any progress. That same minimal music and maximum Molko formula constitutes much of 'Begin the End' and 'Scene of the Crime' before their inevitable attempts at stadium-rock outbursts and crescendoes (and, in Europe, that seems to still appeal). There are the standard ethereal instrument elements that're blurring songs like 'Hold on to Me' into focus with all the subtlety of being waterboarded. And the usual goth-rock theatricality shapes 'A Million Little Pieces' into a moment of parody.

Lyrically Molko's always been tongue-in-cheek at best, but starting off your lead single (the not-very-subtle critique of spending too much time online 'Too Many Friends') with the words "my computer thinks I'm gay" has got to have stemmed from an in-joke between the band. The briefly-promising (for its industrial opening) 'Exit Wounds' details the jealousy of Molko as his romantic interest sleeps with someone else with the charming, if ill-judged chorus "want you so bad I can taste it, but you're nowhere to be found/ I'll take a drug to replace it or put me in the ground".

Not all is lost, though: the final track 'Bosco' is exactly what I was hoping Loud Like Love would have turned out to be: poignant, straightforward, restrained.

It pains me to say, but the realisation that I've somewhat outgrown Placebo is pretty certain now. At least, whilst they remain the dreary, whining romantics that they've been for fifteen years. Battle for the Sun and Meds showed some signs that that was all behind them, but the band - after shamelessly firing Steve Hewitt and still asking Brian Molko to write lyrics - continue to grow weaker and weaker.

I dunno, I'm sorry. I liked them once, too, but then I found everything else.

Rating: 2/10
Highlights: Bosco
Avoid: Purify; Hold on to Me; Scene of the Crime; Begin the End

Artwork Watch: It looks like the logo for a Brazilian series of Big Brother.
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