Zeroes’ Heroes 7: Goldfrapp - Black Cherry [2003]
Over the course of the last 6 months of this decade, i’ll be putting together my favorite twelve albums of the years 2000 up to and 2009. Why twelve? It was too hard to actually cut it down to ten, and reviewing two albums a month seems like a good pace. Expect some safe choices, some incomprehensible ones, but most of all a record-collector having a go at recollecting an eclectic decade.
One thing that separated the Zeroes from the Nineties, like i mentioned in the Bloc Party piece, was the creation of the niche. Debutants like Interpol or The Strokes or indeed Bloc Party seemed to have carved out their own corner in popmusic before they even first set foot in a studio. Every album that follows after the first confirms the route, but never strays from it.
How different the path of Goldfrapp. Felt Mountain was their unworldly debut in 2000, the soundtrack to Snow White would it have been a soft porn film-noir. It took three years to complete the follow-up Black Cherry, and what a shock it was to hear Train, the first single, for the first time... like a long lost collaboration between Gary Glitter and Marlene Dietrich.
If the term "difficult" second album means an album that scares off most of the fans you gained with your first, then Black Cherry was a very very difficult one. It doesn't deliver on Felt Mountain's promise, which in my opinion was a dead-end anyway, a beautiful one, but a cul-de-sac nonetheless. What is so great about Black Cherry, knowing that Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory deliberately chose to make this kind of record after such a stellar one like Felt Mountain, is that it sends a message: Expect change, and expect challenges. With Black Cherry, it became apparent that Goldfrapp had a creative agenda more complex and less accessible than most people expected, and in the long run that proved to be a good thing.
Perhaps at first it seemed a little arrogant - as if Alison assumed that the thing listeners loved most about her debut was her voice, and we can do without the rest. Personally, i think that's the sort of stylistic leap more artists should’ve made the past few years. Opener Crystalline Green shuts the door good and proper on Felt Mountain from the start, with its dry beats, throbbing synths and Vanity 6-style harmonies, and Alison singing “Try to forget who you are now”. Sexual, almost to the point of caricature, which was probably the point all along.
Black Cherry doesn’t entirely abandon Felt Mountain’s aesthetic, proof for that is in the mid-section of the album with the wonderfully lush and erotic Deep Honey and Hairy Trees. After those two songs, the build up from the first part of the record continues with Twist and comes to a glittering sonic climax on Stric Machine - in more than one way a modern day answer to Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. Where the classic disco track was clearly about two people enjoying each other, Strict Machine sings of the wonders of accessorized masturbation. After that, the album gently slips away with Forever and Slippage - basically Strict Machine but a bit slower and lower.
In hindsight, Black Cherry was a transitional record, as they say. You could summarize the record with the word Erotic, on the next record Supernature, the word was Sex. Train got a proper hit single reworking in the shape of Ooh La La, and where Strict Machine was the glittering peak on Black Cherry, on Supernature the glitter was in every corner, wrinkle and hole. It proved the notion that every Goldfrapp album is an adventure on it’s own, and there’s no way of telling which way they’re going. Wonderful electric!