A startling metamorphosis recurs. Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory announced themselves at the start of the decade with Felt Mountain, a perfectly executed mood-piece whose alpine lodge and spy soundtrack textures proved impressionistic enough to double as July Filigree in Pawel Pawlikowski’s little beauty of a film My Summer Of Love.
The follow up, Black Cherry, was an unheralded departure, an interstellar disco dream that enlisted futurist synths and Donna Summer’s deep breathing in a gleaming Barbarella fantasy. The sexual emancipation of Alison Goldfrapp was at once shocking and delightful, as if the bookish student next door had suddenly transformed herself into a mini-skirted, spiky-heeled sex vixen. It was a seam fertile enough to sustain a second record, Supernature, which added T Rex and Lene Lovich to the broth.
However, it was perhaps inevitable that the pendulum would swing back into the soft, pastoral pink. Advance blurb on Seventh Tree bears this out: the title derives from a Goldfrapp dream, the references are to English garden psychedelia, Edward Lear, Emmanuelle and The Wicker Man.
Certainly, ‘Little Bird’ takes nursery rhyme cadences and lovely folk song airs and sets them to a dizzy lysergic backdrop before exploding skywards in an eruption of sound akin to Carol Keogh fronting early Floyd. Elsewhere, ‘Happiness’ is a whimsical, skipping, swinging thing whose combination of ecstatic Beatle-isms and marching band Beach Boys pep proves pretty irresistable.
Goldfrapp’s take on psychotropic pop would be retrocentric, except for its enhancement by technology and production techniques akin to the last couple of Flaming Lips records; songs resplendant in tapestries of harps, Optigons and arcane synths, all woven together with the aid of the redoubtable Flood. There are plenty of languid, limpid airs (‘Road To Somewhere’ and ‘Some People’, the latter a soft orchestral ballad with Goldfrapp channeling Bush, Bolan and Laurie Anderson’s breath-loop from ‘O Superman’), and ‘Eat Yourself’ casts the singer as a croaking blues crone rocking back and forth in the attic in a midge-ridden summer, accompaning scratchy old 78s of herself.
But it’s not an especially introspective album. ‘A And E’, for instance, turns on a hammer dulcimer figure before succumbing to ticking clock pulses that serve to support a soaring and sublime tune. ‘Cologne Cerrone Houdini’ is a Serge Gainsbourg groove that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Anita Lane’s Sex O’Clock. ‘Caravan Girl’, by contrast, is prime drivetime radio pop, while the closing ‘Monster Love’ is a majestic farewell to Hollywood.
A warm pleasure dome pitched up in the middle of January, Seventh Tree is, in fact, the real soundtrack to My Summer Of Love.