Placebo - Androgynous rock for dummies

Having set aside the drunken haze of illusions that had led to the previous record, Brian and co. embark on a process of self-analysis that leads to a turning point, though one framed as a continuation of their past vocabulary, of which the album is the perfect representation. Gone, then, is most of the dark, oppressive weave that had become a defining trait of their sound: in its place comes the continuation of the discourse begun with "Special K" and, above all, "Slave To The Wage", made of guitars raised to undisputed protagonists, a definitive step toward song-form, killer choruses, and an overall mood that is less oppressive and more energetic. It would be wrong to call it a pop turn, at least for now: it's more an attempt to exorcise the demons of Without You I'm Nothing, turning psychodramatic tension into volcanic energy.

On paper, the turn is as coherent as one could reasonably expect from the band, and from a Molko who - though not yet entirely free of drug use - begins a path of rehabilitation that allows him to channel his inspiration in the best possible way. What undermines the quality of a record that gathers some of the finest songs the trio ever wrote, though, is the reckless production work of Jim Abbiss - already behind Björk's "Debut" and future architect of the multi-award-winning debut by Arctic Monkeys - who gives most of the tracks a plastic, cold sheen, decidedly out of place for material born of such emotional tension. Even so, the record manages to hold up thanks to the quality of the songwriting and a series of crystalline gems, effectively ranking as the other peak - after Without You I'm Nothing - of Placebo's career.

The effervescent guitar opening of "Bulletproof Cupid" sounds like a genuine, brief outburst of negativity kept hidden for a long time, an introduction to "English Summer Rain", which embodies both the strengths and weaknesses of the record at once: a vibrant, limpid pop song dressed in damnably aseptic, artificial electronic touches. A similar fate befalls the homage to Sonic Youth in "Plasticine", by far the worst track on the record alongside the short, obtuse "Second Sight", genuine filler that can be safely skipped. Far more focused are the martial "I'll Be Yours" and closer "Centrefolds", a doom-laden ballad that benefits greatly from the exclusion of electronics.

But the album's strength lies in a series of gems: the irresistible "This Picture", a fresh pop-rock cocktail with, for once, a positivist flavor; the heartbreaking, melancholy title track, a genuine exorcism in which Molko throws himself into the search for a possible soulmate; and its ideal thematic culmination, the prayer of "Protect Me From What I Want". To these are added the two unsurpassed highlights of the record: "The Bitter End", an overwhelming rush built on the tension of a relationship ended in drama - chosen as the lead single and destined to become the band's quintessential classic - and the psychodrama of "Special Needs", the emblem of the emotional self-analysis the record represents, where despair turns into an unflinching examination of the mistakes made in underestimating the power of feelings.

A record of huge potential, literally shattered by production choices it would be euphemistic to call questionable, Sleeping With Ghosts marks Placebo's entry into the "counter-tunnel" of recovery, one that will not, however, bring about a simultaneous musical resurrection. Despite the reckless reactions of much of the critics, thrown off by the abandonment of the past's oppressive darkness, the album can in fact be defined as the band's first act of maturity - one that will, however, culminate in subsequent years in a gradual decline into something closer to senility. It remains, in any case, the record that will drag Molko and co. to success especially outside their native Britain, as well as a collection of gems capable of combining introspection and anthemic power with commendable balance.

The tour that follows launches Placebo definitively into a pantheon straddling alternative and mainstream, drawing an ever-growing, boundless number of fans. The record's sales push Virgin to ride the wave and release Covers, a collection of interpretations of other artists' classics that the band had scattered over the years as single b-sides. Among the standouts are the mechanical revisiting of Depeche Mode's "I Feel You", the bow to masters Pixies in a "Where Is My Mind" that harks back to their earliest recordings, the "20th Century Boy" already featured on the "Velvet Goldmine" soundtrack, and the previously unreleased "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush, destined to become a fixture of the band's live setlists.

The following year comes Once More With Feeling, a collection of all the singles released since 1996 accompanied by a DVD featuring the respective videos, probably the best document of the band's work for that portion of the audience without the time or interest to delve into the whole discography. Meanwhile, Molko continues his rehabilitation, managing to cut his drug use to a minimum, though by his own admission retaining a tendency to overindulge in alcohol. Only four years later, in fact, will the frontman openly declare he has won his long, exhausting war against addiction.

The latter is also the central theme of the fifth studio album the band puts together, coming off a long and grueling string of concerts and a brief few-month hiatus between late 2005 and early 2006.

The Placebo that resurface three years after Sleeping With Ghosts are, then, a band that has definitively regained an inner balance to build on, having hit upon, in that record, a (unintentionally) more accessible and easily reproducible formula. And it's precisely in these two statements that the substance of Meds lies: a record decidedly more developed than its predecessor on a sonic level - thanks also to yet another change behind the production desk, with the recruitment of Dimitri Tikovoi, already a mixing assistant on the two previous records - but one that, at the same time, limits itself to revisiting, with results that are nonetheless remarkable, what had already been tried three years earlier, albeit without the same pervasive emotional tension throughout. It is, in short, the album anyone would have expected from Placebo in 2006, one whose strengths lie precisely in the new production and arrangement choices: guitar and bass once again become central protagonists, with electronics reduced to a connective role and the total abandonment of the plastic coldness that had at least partly clipped the wings of Sleeping With Ghosts.

There are actually quite a few fully satisfying results: the opening one-two punch is an absolute steamroller, with the title track — a merciless account of an ecstasy withdrawal crisis — sung in an effective duet with Alison Mosshart of the Kills, which then bleeds into the warped march of "Infra-Red", this time recounting "a gift that alcohol can bring out, namely that of digging through memory and finding things that would otherwise be forgotten forever", to use Molko's own words. The two tracks, chosen respectively as the fourth and third singles, are effectively the fully realized, hi-fi evolution of the more energetic weaves of the recent past, as well as two more instant classics in the band's repertoire, joined in that role also by the scorching "Post Blue", a fixture of nearly every live show for the past twelve years. And all told, it's the entire first half of the album that proves compact and convincing, rounded out by the explosive (and tellingly titled) "Drag", the alienated yet fully realized proto-dub experiment "Space Monkey", and the power ballad "Follow The Cops Back Home", effective in how it adapts a fairly common cliché to the Placebo sound.

The dips, however, come in the second half of the record: "Because I Want You", the third single pulled from the album — a "Plasticine" polished up in sound but not in substance — comes across as pure mannerism, much like the saccharine ballad "Pierrot The Clown" in its own context. Michael Stipe's cameo on a lifeless "Broken Promise" fails to replicate what David Bowie did eight years earlier on "Without You I'm Nothing", and while the atmospheric interlude "In The Cold Light Of Morning" fails in its attempt to raise goosebumps, the acid-tinged passage "One Of A Kind" is even more out of step and disjointed.

In the end, it's the stroke of genius that is the masterpiece "Song To Say Goodbye" that salvages the record's fortunes: an explosive nihilistic anthem also released as a successful lead single — a farewell with countless potential interpretations, in which Molko fully unleashes the frustration born of coming to terms with his many mistakes, frustration that had previously been kept in check during the Sleeping With Ghosts era.

And this sensational epitaph almost seems to suggest the curtain falling on something bigger than just Meds — a sort of closing not of one but of several circles, a point of convergence and conclusion for several open threads. The mistakes, the addictions, but also the artistic narrative carried out over ten years of career all find a definitive resolution: the light long glimpsed at the end of the tunnel materializes into an actual way out, the kind of exit that potentially puts a full stop on everything Placebo has represented over these years.

Musically, the record is a lesser effort — though still, on the whole, far more than decent — compared to its predecessor, but it nonetheless plays a pivotal role in the band's history: with Meds (and its renewed international success), Placebo effectively complete the troubled journey that began with Without You I'm Nothing — one of excess and success, of crises and recovery, of tension and regained balance, of psychodrama first and energy later. Every piece is now in place, with all the pros and cons that come with it: the appeal of a complete body of work is countered by doubts about what comes "next", about which path to take once the previous one has been left behind. A difficult choice that, as has always been the case in the trio's history, will be shaped by a series of personal circumstances and internal band dynamics that will define the following three years.

The first of these arrives at the close of 2006: Placebo, after ten years of success, put an end to their relationship with Virgin — and thus with EMI — via the brief Live At La Cigale, which went out of print within a few months, handing over the rights to their first five albums to Astralwerks (a Universal subsidiary), which reissues them over the following twelve months. With no label behind them anymore, the trio set off on the Meds promotional tour, which will match (but not surpass) the previous one, tied to Sleeping With Ghosts, in terms of earnings and scale: it's precisely during the grueling tour dates that, completely unbeknownst to outsiders, an internal rift between the band members develops step by step, soon taking the shape of Molko and Olsdal versus Hewitt. The three carry on for six months without showing any outward sign of crisis, until, on October 1, 2007, a statement on the band's website announces the drummer's departure from the project.

The two sides' accounts of the matter aren't long in coming, and as usual, they're starkly at odds: "Being in a band is like being married — there can come a moment when, even without losing the love, you realize your interests and approach have changed and that you can't keep living under the same roof", was Molko's rather vague justification. Olsdal's version is more direct and practical: according to him, "during the tour Steve started putting up a wall, cutting off any form of communication with us, and we realized that if we didn't want to drive Placebo into the ground we needed a change". Hewitt, on the other hand, claims that "it all happened out of the blue, with a call from our manager telling me I was out of the band, just like that, out of nowhere, after ten years".

With Hewitt's departure, the end of the journey that began in 1998 becomes official: for Placebo, it's the dawn of a potential new beginning that, while bound to follow on (predictably) from the past, will lead the band toward a "cleansing" of their music that is anything but beneficial, coinciding with Molko's definitive triumph over his demons.

Pop "recovery"

"We wanted to center the album around choosing one's own life,

around choosing to live by stepping out of darkness and into the light.

Not necessarily to be understood as forgetting the darkness,

because it's an essential part of existence,

but rather about choosing and seeking the light"

(Brian Molko su “Battle For The Sun”)

The Placebo that returns to the scene in 2009 is a band full of changes compared to the past. In effect, a trio made new in terms of chemistry and interpersonal dynamics, thanks above all to a Molko who has by now largely overcome his inner turmoil and given up the drug use that came with it, further energized by a now-global fame and by the admiration shown to him by numerous fellow artists — from Timo Maas to Jane Birkin, all the way to Indochine — proud to feature his voice on their own tracks. The link between Brian's emotional state and the band's music will thus, as in the past, prove decisive: his "recovery" will indeed translate into a sunnier, more melodic turn that the band will fully embrace, alongside the simultaneous abandonment of much of the aesthetic that had shaped the band's sound. Gone are the darkness, the psychodrama, the torment, the oppressive weight of the early years, but also the energy and tension of the previous two records: in their place, a burst of sunny air and positivity, translated through melodies and syncopation into a blatant pop-rock drift.

Equally crucial to reaching this new artistic dimension is the arrival on drums of the Adonis-like ex-Evaline Steve Forrest, replacing Steve Hewitt: a figure decidedly removed from the various costumes worn over the years by Molko (and now abandoned in favour of a far less striking, grown-up good-boy look), as well as from the musical soul of the "old" Placebo. His post-hardcore-rooted drumming, decidedly more organic and aggressive than Hewitt's, can also be linked to the shift (overseen by veteran producer David Bottrill, previously behind the boards for Tool, Muse and dEUS) in the songs' arrangements, now more markedly hi-fi and glossy, with the electronics reduced almost everywhere to a mere post-production garnish when not dropped altogether. Last but not least is the decision, once the Virgin contract had run its course, to turn down Astralwerks' offer and instead abandon the world of major labels altogether: PIAS – in effect the major label par excellence of the independent market – is chosen to release the new album, a move that puts the trio in the same company as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails.

This is the nature of the cradle in which the sixth Placebo album, and the first of this new era, takes shape. A record on which fans and critics alike pinned sky-high expectations, to the point that within weeks of the announcement, rumours were already circulating that it would be the best the band had ever produced. The truth, however, is that Battle For The Sun is instead a total failure, and on multiple fronts: stripped of the torment and tension that had filled it up to that point, Placebo's music comes across as devoid of any real communicative power, listless, empty, and not "new" enough sonically to fully break away from the band's past. So, in what is without doubt the worst entry in the band's history, only a handful of moments are salvaged, and even those are hardly outstanding: the title track – a more restrained rehash of the anthemic cliché, rescued by an epic chorus that helps you forget an almost irritating verse – the electronic-tinged melodic fireworks of "Bright Lights", and the unpretentious pop-rock of the pleasant "The Never-Ending Why". The rest of the album alternates between more or less straightforward rehashes of the "old sound", uninspired and seemingly designed only to avoid losing fans (the acidic but never truly corrosive "Kitty Litter", the bland "Breathe Underwater", the clumsy nod to Soundgarden on "Come Undone") and half-hearted dips into the ocean of pop (the tedious "Devil In The Details", the utterly predictable "Speak In Tongues", and the saccharine "Happy You're Gone" and "Kings Of Medicine").

But the real disasters arrive with the two singles chosen to launch the album: the reckless pub-crawl stagger of "Ashtray Heart" – the worst possible way to pay tribute to their brief "apprenticeship" days – and above all the horrifying, irritating rock'n'roll attempt that is "For What It's Worth", both responsible for a commercial flop as spectacular as it was understandable. But the whole album fails on this front too, managing to claim the unenviable title of "worst-selling album" in the career of a band that, along with its ghosts, its drugs and its longtime drummer, seems to have also lost any shred of a clear idea about which direction to take. And "confused" is indeed the most fitting adjective to describe Battle For The Sun, a work that fumbles about in the dark everywhere in search of a dimension that essentially doesn't exist, sketching out the occasional viable idea here and there only to abandon it in a fit of thoroughly damaging euphoria. That same euphoria that Placebo also carried with them into their live shows – themselves noticeably less engaged than in the past – which they kept up relentlessly for a full three years, with the result that by the final leg they arrived exhausted, on edge and half-hearted, as clearly shown by the rather unflattering Rome show three years after the album's release.

Twelve months earlier, almost as if seizing on the nostalgia many fans felt for the band's older sound, Virgin put out on the market the last scraps of material to which it still held partial rights – namely the b-sides of singles released between 1996 and 2006 – in the form of a compilation titled B-Sides: 1996-2006, a must for completists but certainly not essential listening. Meanwhile, the band began performing a new song live, initially announced as the first taste of a possible album, which later became the title track of a self-titled EP – the first official one of their career. B3 confirms what had already been learned from Battle For The Sun: Placebo are by now a mere ghost of the band that had given birth to the quadrilogy running from Without You I'm Nothing to Meds, reinvigorated in soul and spirit even as they grew musically weaker and more exhausted.

Completed once again with Bottrill in the producer's chair and this time released by Vertigo, the mini-album essentially carries on in the same direction as its predecessor, rather than hinting at the distinctly pop turn that would characterise the next album, which arrived – somewhat surprisingly – just a year later. The title track is a harmless romp, made almost enjoyable by the electronic arrangement of the studio version, but essentially weightless when performed live, much like the cover of Minxus's "I Know You Want To Stop", which fails to leave a mark despite a heavy deployment of guitars. The plastic-sounding ballad "The Extra", the proto-prog experiment "Time Is Money" and the more solid yet equally harmless "I.K.W.Y.L." round out a picture that is essentially more pointless than bad, further confirmation that the "new Placebo" were by this point fumbling about in a genuine no-man's-land.

Towards the middle of 2013, the band announced that, via Vertigo, they had re-established contractual ties with EMI and Virgin, by now absorbed entirely into Universal, and that they were at work on a new studio album. Also interesting was the revelation of a few more details about the gestation of B3, which had in fact risen from the ashes of what was originally meant to be a full new studio album, left unfinished due to a lack of conviction about the direction taken alongside Bottrill. It was precisely this (belated) self-criticism that led to the decision to change producer for the seventh time, this time entrusting newcomer Adam Noble with the task of dressing the new album's songs, for which the band's newly recovered label prepared a full-blown media campaign: first a short announcement teaser, then a preview of the future lead single, and finally full streaming on Spotify a week ahead of the official release. All of this crowned an album that, while certainly failing to revive a band now mired in a seemingly bottomless creative crisis, at least marked a step forward in terms of consistency of purpose compared to its predecessor. And the surprising news, then, is that Loud Like Love is not the worst album in Placebo's catalogue. If anything, all things considered, it's a decidedly more honest record than its predecessor, one in which the band throws itself into unpretentious pop-rock whose strength lies in the arrangements, the smoothest and most appealing of the trio's career.

Setting aside barriers that would be an understatement to call merely justifiable, it has to be said in all honesty that this time the album isn't short on songs: from the title track, a thoroughly pleasant build that leads into a final chorus recalling the anthemic charge of the past, to the electronic jolts running through "Exit Wounds", not to mention the self-referential "Scene Of The Crime" and the more relaxed "Begin The End". Songs that are far from outstanding, but put together in such a way as to sound even enjoyable, just like lead single "Too Many Friends", a sort of melodic-nihilist anthem for teenagers tormented by cyberbullying, whose instrumental crescendo ends up, almost despite itself, winning you over.

There's no shortage, however, of a fair number of stumbles, from the saccharine "Hold On To Me" to the embarrassing "Rob The Bank", a mix of the worst of their early days and the unbearable rock'n'roll streak of Battle For The Sun, passing – albeit in smaller doses – through the overwrought string-laden close of "Bosco". Yet amid all this, Placebo-as-pop-band still manage to pull off a stroke of genius in the shape of "A Million Little Pieces", a powerballad of psychodramatic pathos bolstered by a dizzying instrumental section, without question the best ever produced by a band whose weak point has always been the care taken over arrangements.

All things considered, one has to resign oneself to the idea that Placebo have, by now, become a brand through and through, tied almost exclusively to the voice of a frontman who long ago shed the androgynous, rebellious persona that had defined both the great triumphs and the worst missteps of a band now estranged from its own essence. Hypotheses that converge on a single, undeniable truth tied precisely to this latest, emblematic album: if Loud Like Love manages to stand on its own two feet and hold up reasonably well, it is Placebo themselves who seem to have ever less vital energy left, creative and artistic as much as anything else. And even if, in this particular case, the results exceeded every rosiest (and lowest) expectation, it's hard to believe that, should there be a next time, it could follow the same fate. What remains, then, is the memory of a band emblematic of its era, overrated by some as much as underrated by too many, capable over the years of producing a memorable body of songs, even if lacking any particular historical significance. A band that is and remains the perfect embodiment of what rock represented at the turn of the millennium, whose most inspired moments are destined to remain among its symbols, but above all to be listened to: again and again.

At the end of 2015, Placebo released a live album recorded for the MTV Unplugged format, rearranging seventeen songs in acoustic form, recorded live in London. It's hard to replicate the force of their early work unplugged, but Brian Molko's band, who have always relied firmly on electric intensity, know how to play it subtle, skilfully reworking many of the arrangements. The famous hits "Slave To The Wage" and "Meds" are stripped down to almost nothing, some tracks even undergo a process of rewriting (as is the case with "Every You Every Me", sung as a duet with Majke Voss Romme), while on others the presence of strings ensures the melodrama of the originals is preserved ("Without You I'm Nothing" is the most successful in this respect).

The dips into the more distant past ("36 Degrees", the effective "Protect Me From What I Want", here featuring Joan Wasser on vocals) still make the heart race, while the more recent songs leave less of a mark, though they do identify a band that, after its outstanding early work, has always kept up at least an honest level of quality. The result of the new arrangements is at times sorrowful ("Jackie", "Loud Like Love", "Hold On To Me", "Bosco"), at times more energetic ("For What It's Worth", "Too Many Friends", "Post Blue"), and at times a pleasant middle ground ("Because I Want You"). To close the show, the band chose their tribute to the Pixies with "Where Is My Mind?" and the celebrated "The Bitter End". The intimate setting leads the androgynous Molko to engage often with the audience, sweeping away that aloof, unreachable rockstar aura so often pinned on him. And this, too, must be considered a far from negligible achievement.

In 2016, the twentieth anniversary was celebrated – alongside a long European tour – with the "best of" collection "A Place For Us To Dream" and with the covers-and-rarities EP for aficionados, Life's What You Make It.

The cover of Talk Talk opens and gives its name to this new release, a reflective-mooded opener that paves the way for the melodies of the new single "Jesus' Son".

The melancholy, powerful "Twenty Years" appears in two versions, both live, the second one "solo piano". Beautiful and moving is the cover of Rowland S. Howard's "Autoluminescent" (guitarist of the Birthday Party, who died prematurely in 2009), followed by a classy closer for this EP in the form of a reinterpretation of Freak Power's "Song #6".

Never Let Me Go: the album of maturity

Although Placebo have never quite won over critics, they can certainly boast a devoted and loyal fanbase. The risk, though, nine years on from their last studio album, Loud Like Love, was that they might have settled into well-worn pop sounds. Instead the band – now officially a duo, made up of Brian Molko and Stefan Olsdal – choose to shed the preciousness that had enveloped them in the post-Meds era, embracing a new compositional approach.

In an interview with BBC 6, Molko explained: "I went to Stefan with some images and a list of song titles I'd written over the past five years and told him: let's choose the album cover before we write the music, let's start with the song titles and then record the whole album without a drummer. Obviously we couldn't work exactly backwards like that, but it was interesting to completely change our approach. In the end we used not one but two drummers."

Beyond the compositional approach, what's surprising about Never Let Me Go is a creative urgency the pair had been missing for a while. Two "twin demons" in particular stirred Molko and Olsdal's emotions: Covid-19 and anger over Brexit, which forced Molko to leave his "island" and move to Europe, where, in his words, "society is a bit more free, less chauvinistic, xenophobic and sociopathic" – a subject explored mainly on "Chemtrails". The songs are also animated by their usual preoccupations: the duplicitous relationship with drugs, understood here as pharmakon (φάρμακον), death, and an evergreen, sullen anger that nonetheless manages to transcend itself, giving way to melancholy reflections and couplets.

On "Happy Birthday In The Sky" the theme of loss ties in with that of drugs/medicine, while on "Forever Chemicals" the cinema of memory, sluggish from excess, projects recollections anaesthetised by psychiatric drugs into a hic et nunc where the planes of reality and memory chase each other relentlessly. "Hugz" taps into certain noise and glam impulses of the 1990s, bringing to mind "Kool Thing" by Sonic Youth, while "Went Missing" instead nibbles at their own back catalogue, thanks to a spoken word passage reminiscent now of "Lady Of The Flower", now of "Passive Aggressive". It's no coincidence that by the end you're tempted to overlay the line "secret destroyers keep away" onto that "soul mates never die" so dear to lifelong Placebo fans. A small, tender tribute to Dolores O'Riordan and her "Zombie" also seems to emerge from the tangled orgy of instruments in the track's outro.

The more radio-friendly tracks, like "Beautiful James", on which the pair play around with synthesizers, and the rather bland "Try Better Next Time", simple as they are, serve the record's overall balance, bringing back a playful touch before plunging once more into the paranoid turmoil of "Surrounded By Spies", Molko's autobiographical ravings on "Sad White Raggae" – with an EBM opening that recalls IAMX at their best – "Twin Demons", which has everything it needs to pair up with "Special K" and "The Bitter End" live, and the closing invective of "Fix Yourself", buoyed by a limping gait that at times recalls Radiohead's "How To Disappear Completely".

Then there's "The Prodigal", the emotional testament of a healed soul on the verge of departing, offered as a gift to ease the pain of those left behind, with a simple awareness: the death of the body frees the soul from torment and ugliness (So please don't cry/ don't think it's wrong/ my soul is pure/ it sings along). The orchestral textures, with swelling violins, further enrich this unexpected gem, bathed in the golden glow of hope and redemption.

The work done on the mix and arrangements – historically the band's weak point – is excellent overall. There's no extreme compression here to choke the sound, which draws abrasively above all on industrial and electroclash territory; instead there's a solid dynamic range able to give the songs a broader, less predictable feel than on the previous two albums.

Never Let Me Go is therefore Placebo's mature work: solid and inspired, it recaptures the mischievous swagger of their early days on one hand, while on the other it offers up a dazzling new maturity.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia ("Mtv Unplugged"), Lorenzo Pagani ("Life's What You Make It") and Giulia Quaranta ("Never Let Me Go")