[新聞] Placebo- New Album 'Sleeping with Ghosts'
轉錄自 http://www.angloplugging.co.uk/viewPressRelease.cfm?pressReleaseID=409
Placebo release their fourth album 'Sleeping With Ghosts', through
Hut Recordings on March 24th. Produced by Jim Abbiss (The Music,
UNKLE & DJ Shadow) this album is their most emotionally reflective
yet explosive album to date.
Tracklisting is as follows: Bullet Proof Cupid, English Summer Rain,
This Picture, Sleeping With Ghosts, Bitter End, Something Rotten,
Plastecine, Special Needs, I'll Be Yours, Second Sight, Protect Me
From What I Want, Centrefolds. Formats: CD (CDFLOOR17) and LP (FLOORLP17).
With 3 million albums sold worldwide and three Top 10 albums in the UK
there seems to be no time to sit back and reflect; come the end of the
tour in October 2001, after 18 months on the road and having spent six
years challenging everything from homophobia to medical thinking about
drugs being dangerous and winning, Placebo had nothing else to challenge
but themselves. Within a month of getting home the threesome had bought
identical mini-studios and begun toying with ideas for the fourth album,
circulating musical sketches on CD.
'We wanted to do it much quicker,' says Brian, 'and we wanted to work
with somebody who would give us a kick up the ass and make us do things
backwards or sideways'. Enter Jim Abbiss. 'I thought it'd be more
electronic by the time it was finished, I didn't expect it to sound as
rocky as it does. But I kinda saw that as the natural progression, to
have one foot in the rock camp and one foot in a more beats-orientated
place. I felt we'd reached a point where we should refine ourselves,
pull towards the elements we're naturally good at, and we thought that
Jim could put a twist on it that we ourselves would never have thought
of, the benefit of the situation was that two people with very strong
ideas end up somewhere where neither of you would've gone on your own.
And that's kind of what we were hoping we'd achieve.'
And 'Sleeping With Ghosts' is an almighty achievement. It weaves
furious scatterbeat electronics into soul-baring elegies that manage
to be dark, maudlin and riveting at the same time, a trick only
previously performed by the likes of PJ Harvey and Bjork. And when
Placebo wrench open the Big Guitar cupboard and pile into a driving
chordstorm like 'This Picture' or first single 'The Bitter End'
(released March 10th), they sound as though they've had a rock
transfusion from QOTSA themselves. It's a fundamentally experimental
and stunningly fresh shove of the envelope. 'Sleeping With Ghosts'
retains the feral power that's made Placebo the world-demolishing
band they are while both rewiring their hard drive and letting you
in a bit more.
'The album title's about carrying the ghosts of your relationships
with you,' Brian explains, 'to the point where sometimes a smell or a
situation or an item of clothing they bought you kind of brings a person back.
For me it's about the relationship that you have with your memories.
They inhabit your dreams sometimes. There can be a lot in the future
that's gonna remind you of the ghost of relationships past.
So I see the album as a collection of short stories about a handful
of relationships. Most of them mine. In a way writing the songs helps
me to get a lot of the nasty things off my chest and put them in a box
a little bit more, and therefore have a bit more of an objective
discourse with those emotions because you've done something positive
with them, you've rid yourself of them.' Though these dozen tracks
were written over the space of three years, it's the wounded mood of
'I'll Be Yours' and 'Protect Me From What I Want' that dominates.
Relationships are asphyxiating all over the shop: in 'The Bitter
End', bleak piano ballad 'Centrefolds' and the title track, which is
based on an idea Brian picked up from an American psychologist that
people can be 'soulmates' who have relationships repeatedly over many
different lives (Brian, with typically warped gusto, imagines them
reincarnated as brother and sister).
Placebo's success is hard to ignore. All previous albums have been Top 10
in the UK. On their last tour the band played to over 500,000 people in
30 countries at their own headline shows (excluding festivals), they have
sold out shows globally including the US, Asia and Australasia. Their last
album went Top 20 in over twenty countries, this included knocking
Radiohead off the number one spot in France. Placebo also played to
over 6,000 people in Gorky Park, Moscow in 2001.
Despite all this, Placebo are upping their game. Says Brian Molko,
'I think we have to prove ourselves again to a certain degree, coming
back this time, because to come back and to be sloppy and lazy and all
rock star about it would get us an immediate finger in the face. I think
the attitude we're coming back with this time is not taking past success
for granted. We're coming out fighting'.
--
Life is like a dick; when it's hard, fuck it.
--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.csie.ntu.edu.tw)
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