Longtime followers beware: Seventh Tree is not your typical Goldfrapp album. From the first moment of album opener, “Clowns,” it is clear the duo has deviated from its shiny-pop formula for this one. With haunting strings and inaudible vocals channeling Kate Bush on Aerial: A Sea of Honey, “Clowns” sets the tone for what is to come on Seventh Tree—deep sadness and longing for something that must be missing.
“Eat Yourself” sounds like it’s being played out of an old record player, with even more inaudible lyrics, and while it hardly keeps your attention, the track does manage to maintain its charm. Even with its graphic, upsetting lyrics: “If you don't eat yourself / no doubt the pain will instead / If you don't eat yourself / you will explode instead,” the track itself is quite beautiful, if not lagging. And “Cologne Cerrone Houdini,” whose opening is almost identical to Lisahall’s “Is This Real?,” creeps along eerily like a snake casting a spell on a rat.
This is not to say the album is a complete downer. Upbeat moments do exist in tracks such as the very simple “Happiness,” with its poppy vocals, almost doo-wop drums, and, ironically, lyrics that discuss a very shallow sense of being happy and not true happiness at all; and “Caravan Girl,” which blends shoegaze electro pop the likes of Stars’ “Ageless Beauty” with sunny drumbeats and piano that nearly pounce out of the speakers.
Deceiving track “A&E,” though it begins meekly enough, has an uplifting appeal with the opening lyrics, “It’s a blue / bright blue / Saturday / And the pain / has started to / slip away.” With tracks like this, Seventh Tree is able to convey to listeners that it’s not all bad. “A&E” climbs and climbs to reach a driving chorus that moves along like a convertible on an open highway. It’s the moment of realization, for Goldfrapp and listeners alike, that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it might be even brighter than expected.
This is true with many tracks on the album: You don’t always get what you were expecting. “Little Bird,” with its simple organ-laden opening in the vein of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” excellent harmonies during a one-word chorus, and a spooky bassline, slowly builds to a very unexpected downtempo track full of vocal effects, ethereal sounds, and a pulsating drumbeat.
In a word, Seventh Tree is, at its best, inaccessible. If listeners can appreciate Goldfrapp’s departure from shiny dance pop long enough to get through the album, they might just come out of the experience with a renewed interest in unraveling the meaning behind inaudible indie folk.
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