Goldfrapp
Seventh Tree
Mute

On occasion a collection of music comes your way that takes you by surprise. You try hard not to gush over it, but when the sounds hit your ears you realize what you are witnessing is a masterpiece of its genre. Goldfrapp’s fourth album is that — a masterpiece of ethereal pop. Seventh Tree truly astonishes in mood. Listening to the ten tracks is like floating on a dreamy sea of melancholy.

Yet the songs aren’t truly sad. The album starts off with “Clowns”. All acoustic guitars, strings, bass and Allison’s breathy instrument that barely articulates anything in the song. Her vocals come and go like a tide due to backward masking and tape hiss effects. With all this atmosphere you would expect the song to be about the loneliness of a clown. Nope. It’s actually about fake boobies, “Only clowns would play with those balloons/What’dya wanna look like Barbie for?/…Titties that live on and on and on…”. Not the typical subject matter for Goldfrapp, yet it prepares you for the ebb and flow of the rest.

Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory work these songs with more than just their typical electronic sound. The addition of live drums and guitars helps lift Seventh Tree above the typical drowning in maudlin that too many Emo bands fall prey to. Take “Happiness” for instance — one of two songs that could actually be considered mid-tempo. The song seems to be about finding happiness in tone, but deeper inspection reveals lyrics to be a commercial for joining a cult: “We can see your troubled soul/Give us all your money/We’ll make it better”. Another amazing thing about the album is its specific and carefully planned out arrangements. In the aforementioned “Happiness” a pan flute plays under the singing evoking a sense of a pied piper leading you to trap.

At Seventh Tree’s heart is the band’s true work of art. “A&E” in a little over three minutes it digs up feelings of loneliness, isolation, psychotic co-dependence, hope, love, confusion, despair and hospitalization. (A&E stands for Accident & Emergency in the U.K.) All this is done with nature sounds, a lone acoustic guitar, swellings of keyboards and an eery choir of Alison’s vocals. In other words, it’ll never be a hit. It conjures up too many complex emotions for the masses; however, the Top 40 crowd will be missing out on what will probably be one of the most beautiful songs of 2008 if not the decade. It’s that good once you’ve explored being in its skin.

And there are so many other great songs. The exploration of human nature in “Some People”, the almost rock song and potential single in “Caravan Girl”, and the enigma that is “Eat Yourself”. It must be pointed out that like their last album Supernature it pays to listen to the end. Much like “Number 1″, “Monster Love” here is a must hear. A twisted, gorgeous song, it uses a big chorus and more backward masking effects which emulate the feeling of experiencing “The folly of a monster love/Like you”. The chorus is especially instantly likable and as Alison fades repeating, “Everything comes around/Bringing us back again/Here is where we start/And where we end,” you are left with a sense of hope that things will turn out just fine and with a strange urge to just start Seventh Tree from the beginning in an attempt to recapture that innocent feeling of discovery before naivety is lost.