Head First Into The Other Direction Again

Through their career spanning the past decade and five full-length studio albums, Will Gregory and Alison Goldfrapp of Goldfrapp have played ping-pong with fans’ expectations, regularly ducking into, and back out of, various starkly contrasting trip-hop niches. 2000’s Felt Mountain was a downtempo heroin trip. The next two albums flipped the plan, neither of them anything less than a funkadelic dance party in a box. And then Goldfrapp spun our heads in 2008 with Seventh Tree, an ethereal, haunting, heartstring-plucking folk album (by way of synthesizers).

Their latest, Head First is a rebound right into the stratosphere. Not only is it more upbeat and ecstatic than both Black Cherry and Supernature, but it’s even poppier than most of today’s “proper” pop albums.

Opening track Rocket, while being a rather flawlessly constructed pop song, is almost wince-inducing to heterosexual ears, being so unabashedly saccharine. The chorus is a pickup line right out of Studio 54: “Oh oh oh, I got a rocket / Oh oh oh, You’re going on it… You’re never coming back.” At first blush, it sounds like a pretty straightforward, ‘everybody come with me’ sort of celebration anthem, something along the lines of Madonna’s thoroughly mindless Holiday. Though if you listen closely to the lyrics (or watch the video), you might notice a plot twist; Alison doesn’t intend to join you on that magical rocket trip.

Believer and Alive are no less rapturously delivered, and through these tracks the beats snap their bubblegum from behind simple, uplifting choruses, sans Rocket’s sinister ulterior motives. The three tracks that follow slow things down just a notch, providing a trance set, trading the Madonna element for, say, some Depeche Mode.

For the third act, Shiny And Warm and I Wanna Life brings everyone back onto the dance floor for a final rave, and then Voicething is purely atmospheric. I’d call it an instrumental, but that description only works if you understand that Alison Goldfrapp’s voice is the primary instrument employed, uttering not a single decipherable lyric.

There’s really no good reason to knock these happy synth-pop songs in and of themselves, and I don’t mean to present their unmitigated cheerfulness as a fault.

With that said, for the most part, this album is a triple layer chocolate cake, with the richest damn icing you ever put your tongue to. Now this style of music certainly does lend itself to excess and decadence, and Head First might be a really good album to keep in your Prius for those all-night dance club crawls. However, our conservative, uptight music critic’s objective take is that this time around, it’s more fun than genius from Goldfrapp.

We’re not calling it a dud by any means; it certainly has its place, and we must continue to give credit to Goldfrapp for continuing to follow their hearts and whims into new territories. Yet it’s their more complex and inspired albums, particularly Supernature and Seventh Tree, that lead their legacy. Those will stand the test of time far better than Head First, and in those albums lie the promise of greater things to come from Goldfrapp.