Placebo – Never Let Me Go

Elevator Lady

First of all, Brian Molko is still, twenty-some years after I ever first saw him, one of the most physically perfect humans I have ever seen. Does this matter in the scheme of things?

Well, when you consider his strange voice, almost too nasal and sometimes too non-singeresque, the repetitive-on-purpose lyrics and the way he just eclipses everything else to do with his own profession, it must matter a little.

Driving endless pointless hours in Los Angeles at the end of the ’90s while waiting for the millennium apocalypse, I was enthralled with Placebo. They completely captured in every way the desperate sad end of the world angst that my younger self romanticised infinitely. While I personally battled with things that nearly snuffed me, and my world did end for awhile, I was obsessed with the first two records from Placebo, which played on a loop for the whole of that section of my life.

I confess I had no idea what most of those early songs were about at the time, but therein might lie the secret of Placebo. The adaptability of arcane lyrics that Molko gave could perfectly become the listener’s own meanings by some strange magic conveyance of his delivery. There is something about his singing that just makes one want to grind one’s teeth and cry, and I don’t really know why that is.

So, here we are in another apocalyptic time, and this new record which couldn’t take into account any of the news items of today (pandemic yes, but recorded before Ukraine’s tragedies) still seems to have the possibility of making little cupped hands to catch and contain all of the wild earnest longings and desperation of these times.

Technically, I suppose, Never Let Me Go is fairly perfect and has as many hooks as their first two albums combined. There are a lot of programmes driving the music and all fairly gleams with production polish. The Placebo core of power guitars is on point and maybe even reined in, and the songs are crisp and succinct. They play perfectly and the skill level is second to no-one. There are nods to David Bowie and shades of Nirvana, as if required by loyalty, but buried enough so as to avoid irritation.

All the rawness is in the vocals and that’s exactly where Placebo excels in stabbing a bleeding heart. I think they have for decades paved a road for gender smash as well as rejections or embraces of sexuality — possibly going further than others to neutralise that territory and make it not be a focus. I am happy to dwell on other things, like having this godly band soundtrack all upcoming apocalypses. In this Placebo never lets us down.

-Maryna Fontenoy-