Placebo, Battle for the Sun

Battle for the Sun is a much-anticipated CD for those die-hard Placebo fans who were disappointed by the band’s last album, Meds. This CD, number six, reverts back to band’s old style, with somewhat squealing guitars over Brian Molko’s nasal but forever reassuring voice. The familiar touch of their instrumentation is there: hollow piano parts and crunching guitar with distortion. It’s recognizable but fresh, partly due to the break from Virgin Records, and therefore it’s achieved the highest debut of any of their past efforts in the United States.

Placebo started their career in London in the mid-’90s under the label of Caroline Records, then switched to Virgin Records in the late-’90s, but singer Brian Molko and bassist Stefan Olsdal knew that with their expired contract, they should go back to their old way of intimate writing and thus self-funded Battle for the Sun. This freedom allowed them to expand on their musical intentions and show their true selves on the new album, equipped with a young new drummer, Steve Forrest, and in the process adding an American to the band.

The best part about this CD is that it seems to get better as it goes along. I don’t know if it was on purpose, but the weaker songs appear to be in the middle, so the tracks start strong, fade, then build back up to the more memorable, epic numbers. The lyrics of the album, several of which were written by Molko on a trip to Paris, reveal an insightful thinker’s deepest thoughts and come off as refreshing after their releases of the past few years.

The songs aren’t quite as melancholy, but it’s mainly the lyrics and not the music which give them an uplifting feel, like “You’re beautiful and so blasé / So please don’t let them have their way,” from “Speak in Tongues,” and the repeated chant, “A heart that hurts is a heart that works,” from “Bright Light,” which encourages the pain involved in letting your guard down to be with someone and enlightens the listener with the unbiased truth of the idea. “Happy You’re Gone” has the least lyrics of all, but the beauty of them, combined with the subtle music which expands and contracts in bursts, still makes it one of the stronger efforts on the album.

The starter, “Kitty Litter,” holds some of Molko’s golden lyrical choices and impressive vocabulary, as he describes longing for someone’s “surreptitious glances” and insists “I need a change of skin.” “Ashtray Heart” also shows their literary side with the merging of place and time with the phrase “you took a jump into forever.” “For What it’s Worth”, short as it is, gets the job done as the first single from the new CD, expressing the band’s usual cynicism. The video is pretty easy to come across, so look for it, and more importantly, buy this CD, because Placebo canceled their tour dates in Texas.