Placebo - Sleeping With Ghosts

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Music reviews of Sleeping With Ghosts

Music Review: Our Lady of the Flowers' confessional
Rating: 3 Stars

well...

It's not a *bad* album perse... it's just not good. Background info: I've been a Placebo fan since 1998, swept up in the "Without You I'm Nothing" haze and the common 13-year-old "ooo... pretty boy!" mindset. And it wasn't unjustified. Mr. Molko was in his make-up drenched, long-haired heyday, writing quirky pop songs with the subtle dementia and histrionic ambivalence characteristic of many great post-punk bands (as well as many great bands of all kinds). The first album is essentially bursting out of the seems; energetic and defiant pop music with a camp edge, which was a breath of fresh air amongst the earnest drone of some many bands of the era. The music was fresh and alive... it had a life all its own and embodied a world of drugs, sex, and an acute existential awareness and expressiveness as affected by drugs and sex, all filtered thru the corpse of camp rock n' roll. Then came Without You I'm Nothing. A wonderful album. Probably their best. Much darker and slightly ethereal - strangely imperminent, as if the same thoughts in the brilliant minds giving us the first album were twisted and contorted in fun-house mirrors and dizzied by the fumes of black nail varnish. A beautiful and evokative album by all accounts (I still think "your smile would make me sneeze/ when we were Siamese" is one of the best lines ever).

That was the end of an era. Black Market Music followed suit, bringing them tons of new fans, but showing an "aging" (for lack of a better term, though seems akward considering most of the music I listen to is courtesy old or dead people) Placebo. The artistic and intellectual vision and intensity of the previous two albums was lacking, but it was (and is... why the hell am I using past tense? oh well) still a wonderful album, despite its often confessional nature. But there was still a spark, a certain intangible something, and the album seemed to create a life (albeit a slightly more boring life).

So along comes Sleeping With Ghosts. When news of the album hit the internet, I was thrilled... just the title of the album is genius... it sums up so much of what I feel (see the old/dead musicians comment above) and what I felt Placebo's early music possessed. So, I bought the album expecting MY Placebo to be back. So wrong. The album is drenched in mundane filler, as if, in the process of aging, their souls died or decayed or something. The album possesses no soul, no spark, nothing... no expression or life, only a trail of sad confessions and "used to be"s. The lyrics are vapid and one dimensional ("this happened to me... it was bad... be sad" sums up most of the songs) in meaning, not to mention the almost complete lack of word play and logic twists that once defined Placebo. The music is also bland alterna-rock BS... very few of the awkward rhythms and interplay of yore, much more straight-forward, well, alterna-rock.

And no, I don't dislike the album because they changed... Many bands change and do it well (they manage to change their style while maintaining a universal spark of some sort), and even Without You I'm Nothing is quite different from the self-titled. I dislike this album not because the style is different, but because there's nothing there to define Placebo... nothing to give the album life. That being said, "This Picture', "Sleeping With Ghosts', and "Special Needs" ARE great songs. The only problem is, they're the only great songs on the album, and only 2 or 3 other songs are even good (to be honest, half the album is unlistenable garbage... what the hell is "Plasticine"?).

I'm giving the album 3 stars just because I can't bear to give them lower... they were once one of my favorite bands, and may be again. We'll see what happens with the next album.

Description of Sleeping With Ghosts

Alternative Rock CDs

• Music > Styles
• Classic Rock
• Pop
• Rock