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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Coming soon to a catwalk near you, alas., February 17, 2001
Ladytron are an image-conscious band from Liverpool who dress in black like four little Dieters, stand behind their keyboards unsmilingly in concert, and number two designers and a model among their pretty vacant, vacantly pretty ranks. Have you seen the 80's new-wave movie Liquid Sky? Ladytron MEMORIZED it, along with the complete Kraftwerk songbook and every note of Giorgio Moroder's score to Scarface. Here's the kicker: Daniel Hunt, composer and Svengali behind Ladytron, is neither a model nor a designer, just a master pop craftsman to rank with any of what I take to be his idols, not only Florian Schneider of the afore- and oft-mentioned Kraftwerk but Brian Wilson, hometown hero Paul McCartney, Benny & Bjorn, or anyone else you care to name. The last names I mentioned may in truth be the most accurate: until I heard this album, I thought only the Swedes could write these kind of perfectly engineered, Mercedes-Benz melodies without coming off as hollow and dissatisfying. While I can't say Ladytron are the most personal group around, they're not the dispassionate automatons they pretend to be either, and like Beck, the Buzzcocks, Girlfrendo and select other artists they turn what could be overcleverness into a virtue, with lyrics that go *plink* in your mind. Johns rightfully mistrusts the fashionplate image he's created and plays off it throughout the album, telling a story in "Discotraxx" about a couple who, like the characters in Bret Easton Ellis' Glamorama, are too sinfully beautiful ( and probably stupid ) for true love: "With the way they look / They were made to bring each other down." Helena Marnie's asp-like hissing of this line, and the finality of the drum machine beat that follows, are sure to give you chills. Then there are "Playgirl" and "Ladybird," two melancholy girl swingers whose lonely lives are redeemed somewhat by the robo-lullabies Marnie coos them to everlasting sleep with. However, after a dozen or so listens I'd say the highlights -- though this is one of those albums, not uncommon in this golden age of underground music, where everything sounds like a single -- are "Another Breakfast With You" and "The Way That I Found You." The first of these is a throbbing, thrumming, buzzing classic that makes better use of processed fart sounds than anything since Pete Shelley's "Homosapien." I may be reading too much into this, but I think it's about that scene in Citizen Kane where Welles tracks the dissolving marriage of Kane and the governor's daughter through, appropriately enough, increasingly tense breakfast appointments linked with dissolves. Here as always Ladytron perfectly judges the exhilaratingly nihilistic feel of the music and adds lyrics to match: "I didn't feel a thing / When you told me that / You didn't feel a thing / Another breakfast with you." The springy, almost jubilant "The Way That I Found You" proves Ladytron aren't as glum as they let on, and features the deathless line: "Slack in the crowd watching the women's tennis / That was the way / Was the way that I found you." The only hitch is that you probably won't want to listen to the four instrumentals here more than a couple times, though none of them are necessarily bad. It's just that when you're capable of an "Idioteque," then "Treefingers" doesn't really cut the mustard -- you know what I mean. Otherwise, this is one of the most fully-formed and perfectly-realized debuts of the last fifteen minutes. And in the end, who cares if it becomes abhorrently a la mode? Ladytron have tapped into a deeper vein of chic anomie than almost anything since James Dean.
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