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"A winning return for "Placebo" with a more experimental and dark "Never Let Me Go"."
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5/5
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The eighth album released eight years after the last one, "Never Let Me Go" is singular in more ways than one: for the first time, Placebo is a duo, with Steve Forrest having left the band's drums in 2015, a year that led to a best-of tour to celebrate the two decades of the first opus and the release of a compilation.
During this period, Brian Molko and Stefan Olsdal, the two masterminds behind the Placebo project, felt locked in by being forced to play old songs as time continues to inexorably fly by headlong. In order to regain a taste for music and to get out of the torpor of the past, some simple instructions were applied: do everything backwards. Thus, the cover, the name of the album and the titles were found first, generating in return songs and a creative spark that was just waiting to emerge.
Here Placebo explore the forced freedom of not having a fixed drummer by riding electro waves, starting off strong with 'Forever Chemicals' and ending with the cold, sharp critique of 'Fix Yourself'.
Depeche Mode, Trent Reznor or even David Bowie and Brian Eno seem to appear and disappear along tracks mixing intimacy and modesty, grandiloquence and voyeurism. The subject is here very personal, always dark, alternating paranoid and experimental diatribe close to Archive ('Surrounded By Spies'), simplistic and claimant track against the lie of the appearances ('Hugz'), the melancholic sweetness linked to the loss of a loved one ('Happy Birthday In The Sky'), the deception in all its narcissistic splendor ('This Is What You Wanted'), the orchestral escape ('The Prodigal') and of course the end of the world as humans know it, but in the form of an unstoppable pop-song ('Try Better Next Time').
Because dark does not mean devoid of humor, however sarcastic it may be.
Cynicism remains the best placebo when the pill of reality is hard to swallow. - Official website
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TRACK LISTING:
01. Forever Chemicals - 05:09
 02. Beautiful James - 04:09
03. Hugz - 03:52
04. Happy Birthday In The Sky - 05:09
05. The Prodigal - 04:47
06. Surrounded By Spies - 05:14
07. Try Better Next Time - 03:08
08. Sad White Reggae - 03:25
09. Twin Demons - 03:58
10. Chemtrails - 04:31
11. This Is What You Wanted - 04:12
12. Went Missing - 05:06
13. Fix Yourself - 05:02
LINEUP:
Brian Molko: Chant / Guitares / Claviers
Matt Lunn: Batterie / Choeurs
Stefan Olsdal: Guitares / Choeurs
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(0) MIND(S) FROM OUR READERS
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Top of the page
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(4) COMMENT(S)
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READERS
4/5 (1 view(s))
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STAFF:
4/5 (8 view(s))
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IN RELATION WITH PLACEBO
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OTHER REVIEWS
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