REVIEW: Placebo, Without You I'm Nothing (Virgin)
- Tim Mohr
As if scanning the seating chart of an eighth-grade classroom, when you look at Brian Molko of Placebo you find yourself going, "boy, girl, boy, girl." Molko tends to wear slinky black outfits and lots of red lipstick. With the glamorous aspirations of a Hollywood startlet and an electric guitar that seems to have been tuned by Sonic Youth, Molko embodies a certain fin-de-siecle (or millenium, as the case may be) sensibility: youthful nihilism, the forced vacancy of anti-intellectualism, and wining self-pity all inform his lyrics on Placebo's second album, Without You I'm Nothing.
Up to now, Placebo have gained notice primarily in the UK. Throwing down the androgeny card in a country where bands like Suede break the bank with only half-hearted bluffs in this direction, Placebo took the atonal riffs and nasal complaints of their eponymous debut into the top ten. Placebo look like little girls and have reinstated American guitars on the British charts.
Placebo's musical tastes contrast sharply with the fey pop that typifies many British guitar bands du jour and the Teva-wearing, prep-school- athlete-turned-crunchy-musician-in-post-Grateful Dead jam bands of American college rock. From skidding, angular guitar lines hurried along by fuzzed bass lines and frenetic drums, to tinsel glam ballads worthy of early Bowie, Placebo represent both a new phase of alternative and a throw-back to the Daydream Nation-era of Lower East Side noise bands.
Placebo's gender-bending imagery and ambiguous lyrics, though likely to make fraternity social chairmen rather ornery, lend an odd universality to the band and the problems they explore on Without You I'm Nothing. "I'm a queen,a libertine, and every time you vent your spleen I seem to lose the power of speech...you're slipping slowly from my reach--tick, tock, tick, tock," moans Molko on the title track, counting off the seconds as his companion withdraws.
It is precisely this type of lyrical quandry that makes Without You I'm Nothing the soundtrack that we deserve: comfortable in the abstract with proclaiming his more outlandish qualities, Molko recognizes the potentially alienating affect this can entail in practice.
Placebo suffer from urban fatigue and are wary of stasis. "You try to break the mold before you get too old," sings Molko in "Summer's Gone," before resigning himself to a somewhat less ambitious goal: "You try to break the mold before you die." Not that that sentiment--or buying a record towards that end--is particularly original, but at least Placebo don't sound like Semisonic.
