In 2005, Supernature won Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory their first Grammy nomination, a pile of sync money, and an undeniable influence over the sound of pop to come. It gave aspiring indie-dance acts greater permission to embrace levity and inebriated partygoers plenty of coke anthems and ill-advised karaoke options. And it gave Goldfrapp an image they’d never fully escape: the electroclash-era buzz band in ’80s outfits. It’s a reputational flattening that treats the delicate, more organic material that makes up at least half of their discography as an afterthought, or an unwelcome musical power outage. It reduces Alison Goldfrapp’s role to that of a unifunctional synth dominatrix frontwoman—the kind of banal misogyny that she’s lamented in interviews. It elevates the iconic, at the expense of the spellbinding.
But how would you prefer to be remembered by history, should you be so lucky: at your most influential, or at your most you? Decades into her career, Goldfrapp still has spells to cast. Her second solo album, Flux, arrives from her own label, written during a period when she was single for the first time in years. Judging by the music, life for her felt heady with possibility. “I want to swoon, I want to bloom,” she declares on “Play It (Shine Like a Nova Star)”; elsewhere, she conjures reveries for “somewhere and somebody new.” Like The Love Invention, Flux was co-produced with Richard X, 2000s Britpop’s master of dancefloor fillers. But Flux seeks a more elusive chemistry: Even when Goldfrapp sings about the platonic sublime—such as the awestruck “Sound & Light,” inspired by her longing to see the aurora borealis—she infuses it with mystery. As David Lynch once tweeted, she’s connected to the moon.
Well, that or the “luna goo,” as Goldfrapp coos at the beginning of “Reverberotic.” The track is the strictest machine here: a slow, steady synth grind that shivers with falling-star effects; the metaphorical counterparts are surely intended. But despite its goopy intro and Eusexua-style neologism, it’s not a joke. Goldfrapp’s vocals are so airbrushed that the intro registers less as words (perhaps for the best, in this case) than a continuous swoon. She means what she says—and on the next track, the besotted and very reverbed “Strange Things Happen,” she proves it.
Of Goldfrapp’s discography, Flux resembles most the ethereal atmospherics of Seventh Tree or the noir fairytales of Tales of Us. “UltraSky” begins with a lonely SOS into the darkness, then gives way to a breathy sunrise, Goldfrapp’s voice rising out of its husky register into an Aerial soprano. The Italo disco-esque “Magma” is less song than haze; it heats the air by convection. As Goldfrapp’s gone solo, her music’s become more about connection, and the most bitter track, “Play It,” is also the hardest-edged, both in sound and imagery. Goldfrapp’s voice is fed into a vocoder sneer, and the image of choice is a nova star—something that explodes on its own.
This is all familiar musical territory, in no small part because of Goldfrapp’s own influence. “Hey Hi Hello” is an exuberant dance-pop track in the “Call Your Girlfriend” mold, out to prove there’s no worldly complication of love that can’t be blasted away with enough glitter. Perhaps inevitably, Richard X’s presence tends to make this material converge toward Annie; “Find Xanadu” in particular lives in the same realm of hothouse melodrama as “Anthonio” or her later Dark Hearts. But Goldfrapp’s voice is sinuous enough to set the songs apart, slipping through cracks where other vocalists might straightforwardly belt. Her writing, too, is disarmingly optimistic; even the roller-rink couples skate of “Cinnamon Light” or the storybook transcendentalism of “Ordinary Day” come off earnest rather than saccharine. And, unlike many albums to come from its synth-pop cohort, Flux resists being taken apart for playlists. Set almost any similar song against it, and you realize how heady a spell has just been broken.
