One thing writers often don't give musicians enough credit for is the rationale for their restlessness. If a well-known pop artist alters their style-- especially if it deviates from a sound that made them a commercial success-- there's often this urge to label the musician as bored and impulsive, chasing new trends or jumping off bandwagons as if holding off stagnancy is their only motivation to test their creativity. It can be upsetting to longtime fans, but often times the only real hurdle to these new directions is unfamiliarity-- just look at Goldfrapp, who startled their earliest fans by shifting from the surrealistic elegance of their 2000 orchestral-pop debut Felt Mountain to a beat-heavy mid-decade run at the dance charts. With two hard-to-top electro-pop albums under their belts-- 2003's Black Cherry and 2005's Supernature-- it's safe to assume that Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory are perfectly happy with getting some closure on what they've accomplished in the last few years and are moving on to something else out of a feeling more substantial than impatience. It was unprecedented enough that a group which started out trafficking in cabaret eeriness and cinematic grandiosity would ease so naturally into club-pop, so it's not out of the question that dialing back to pastoral, folksy indie-electronica would unearth another side of a duo that was shaping up to be one of the decade's most versatile.
So how could a group that's already established success with slow, lush ballads-- think 2000's "Pilots", 2003's "Forever", or 2005's "You Never Know"-- release an album filled with a whole bunch of uncompelling attempts at them? It could be because Goldfrapp's best songs, regardless of how downbeat they were, at least had something to grab the ear melodically, where most of the material on Seventh Tree focuses more on subtle, slow-moving ambience. This ambience is often so subtle and slow-moving it doesn't seem to go anywhere, and it coasts on some frothy sense of pleasantness that evaporates the moment the song ends. Like the bulk of the album, there's a certain beauty in opener "Clowns", but it's an empty one-- more lullaby than pop song, it's symptomatic of what happens when you take all the grandeur out of big sweeping melodies.
Other songs attempt to use these flimsy backdrops to build up to big, epic crescendos-- the Nick Mason drums cutting into the narcoleptic Air-circa-Virgin Suicides swoon in "Little Bird"; the latter-day Moby bombast that rears its head in the second half of "A&E"'s Sarah McLachlan-isms-- and it feels false and gratuitous, as if it were the only way to maintain any actual momentum. At its best-- the desolation of "Cologne Cerrone Houdini" and "Some People", which inject the ambience with a much-needed eeriness-- this stuff's fairly soothing; at its worst it evokes that old "Mystery Science Theater 3000" bit about the two-note chords of New Age music: "Put your finger down here...now put another finger down...now hold it down for an hour...now hold it down 'til you get a record contract from Windham Hill." At least "Caravan Girl" provides a nice, upbeat Neu!-meets-ABBA distraction, but it's too little too late.
All of Gregory's codeine melodies would be a lot more salvageable, however, if Alison undercut it with the trademark strengths of her voice. It's what made the Marlene Dietrich mood of Felt Mountain so intriguingly weird, while Black Cherry and Supernature would have simply been slightly-above-par electro-glam ephemera without her Kylie-gone-sinister purr. But she's not assertive or seductive or mysterious here; what she's offering is the kind of mannered, chirpy delicacy you could get from any number of indie-folk and adult contemporary artists piped through off-brand coffeehouses everywhere. There's still some interesting dissonance in hearing this fragile version of Goldfrapp's voice wrap around lyrics that occasionally match the ominous nature of her older songs; "A&E", shallow as it sounds, hints at a pill overdose.
But with all the excitement and decadence drained out of the music and the voice, the trite themes stand out a bit more clearly: you can be happy if you give money to people who promise to make your life better ("Happiness"); birds have wings and are free ("Little Bird"). That's assuming you can understand Goldfrapp's lyrics in the first place, since she mumbles incoherently and is muffled under a swampy mix through half the record, which only highlights the feeling of sleepy halfheartedness. Even if Seventh Tree is sonic dishwater, I'll give Goldfrapp enough credit to assume that this isn't change for its own sake, that the motivation for this album's tone wasn't simply a fatigued boredom with their old sound. It's just too bad most listeners won't be able to say the same about their own reactions to this new one.
