These days it is not so much about life getting in the way of things that you want to do but rather life getting in the way of itself to make you feel like nothing is getting done despite your best efforts.

Case in point, this journal entry is a little late in being written due to the amount of extra “life-min” I have had to sort through since getting myself a new job. And whilst finally graduating out of the mire of unemployment is cause for some celebration in terms of now being able to pay for stuff like rent, broadband, homemade kimchi and other general living amenities like every other capitalist pleb ought to in order to survive, I would feel remiss not mentioning how overwhelming it has often felt too, especially with regards to essentially starting again from the ground up in an industry in which I had very-little-to-well-no-real experience in. And all this happening amidst a pandemic which for every corner turned seems to advance towards a new avenue of alarm and panic has not helped much either, particularly in one egregious personal instance which brought another COVID scare into my life the day before I was due to get my first vaccination.

Still managed to get it though; points to the malign hands of fate for irony, I guess…

And though the hour-and-a-half journeys to and from work have helped bolster my music library in terms of being able to listen to new releases, finding enough downtime to collect my distracted thoughts and apply them to keyboard has been tough, especially seeing as most of my idle hours are spent either watching YouTube videos about films that I have already seen and know all kinds of trivia about anyway or navel-gazing over past indiscretions from my formative years whilst slowly dying inside from intense levels of cringe, particularly those spurred into memory thanks to many a moment of misplaced revelry from my days at university. Still, not all the memories concerning my third decade of existence are dominated by continuous waves of embarrassment, not least those concerning the music that helped inform my taste for years to come; one such example that stands particularly tall in my memory as one of the ultimate night-out warm-up albums from the 2000s is this absolute gem of synthpop debauchery, which despite my best efforts is still not steadfastly affixed enough to my many attempts at pole-dancing in a particularly boxy nightclub in Brighton to make me want the ground to swallow me up.

VINYLLY

#5: Black Cherry – Goldfrapp (2003, Mute Records/Stumm196)

Spotify / Apple

With regards to Black Cherry’s reputation as one of the albums that saved pop music from itself in the decade of questionability that was the noughties, there are two key factors amongst a vast many that seem fundamental to its success and continued lineage.

First off, for fear of sounding too succinct for my own good, Goldfrapp’s follow-up to their well-received-though-timidly-selling first album Felt Mountain represented quite a curious shift in terms of tone for the fledgling outfit. Though it may not register as violent a snap in an artist’s new direction as the most previous entry in this series, album two for the electronic pop duo of Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory does mark enough of a change from the sonic direction of their galvanising debut effort to turn the listener’s ear near enough completely the other way around from what its predecessor had done. For the most part, the archly sinister and gorgeously psychedelic trip-pop of their previous work had been replaced with a more stridently industrial concoction, the only real assurance of their being from the same artistic oeuvre being their sharing of their namesake’s beauteous voice intoning just as much lustful longing and rapt sensuousness as it had done before. Alison had expressed a sense of emotional claustrophobia immediately after touring with Felt for the previous couple of years and wanted to do something more propulsive and improvisational that mirrored the darker indiscretions often found when one heads out for a night on the town rather than a dark journey into the soul.

Secondly, Goldfrapp’s switch to dead-eyed-glam synth-pop arrived at a moment when pop music had begun to herald in a new age of edgier fare than it had previously enjoyed, especially in the United Kingdom where at the time the charts were proliferated with inoffensive hits from the likes of Westlife, S Club 7 or whoever won the nationally televised talent show competition that was broadcast the previous year. As productions from the likes of Richard X and Xenomania began gaining traction in the charts for their irresistible use of samples from dance-pop hits of yester-decade with a smirkily modern insouciance that perfectly encapsulated the present day mindset, another subgenre of dance music called electroclash began to emerge from queer nightspaces and flirt with public pop prominence, trading in blown-out beats and modish synths both fighting for space amidst pitch-shifted vocals and suggestive lyrical content.

Straddling the line between these two offshoots, Goldfrapp bridged the gap between the cannily referential pop charms of Sugababes and the celebratory filth of Peaches with sultry aplomb, seducing their way into many a (mostly gay) fan’s music library and becoming mainstays of the pop world ever since. Opening track “Crystalline Green” sets the scene perfectly, its laser-like bass synths belligerently ushering the song to life with stop-start staccatoisms as if the equipment had just been turned on right after the duo hit the record button on the mixing desk, only for Alison’s shimmering vocal to nonchalantly declare “Here we come” with such aloof sauciness that you cannot help but be instantly down for whatever ride this album is going to take you on, eventually segueing into a gorgeous piece of midtempo synthpop that feels so vintage it sounds as if it were excavated from a time capsule buried twenty years previously.

And after that palette cleanser, we get the album’s lead single, “Train”, Goldfrapp’s vocals moaning and sighing with wanton fierceness as a monstrous mechanism of beat signatures marches through with a truculent disregard for subtlety or reserve that could not have been a better opening salvo to use in breaking way from the previous album’s more esoteric tone. Other highlights from the album that honour this particular volte-flex from Felt are “Tiptoe”, a seductive stomper that plays like Marlene Dietrich singing live from The Downward Spiral, and fellow single “Twist”, a literal rollercoaster ride of lusty abandon that crescendos so hard and fast that it leaves its vocalist screaming with lusty abandon before the song is even finished.

Which is not to say that Cherry is all surface level kink with zero depth or tonal variance to be found elsewhere on the album. Echoes of Felt’s soothing ambience can be found on slower tracks such as “Hairy Trees” and “Forever” whilst the aforementioned “Tiptoe” does incredibly well at turning its mirrorballed heal into its own sonic texture about halfway through to reveal a high-drama string section ready to crash through for optimum swoonage. And then there’s the title track, which is as lovely a tear-stained ballad Goldfrapp have yet wrought, a heady combination of distorted beats and stirring orchestral arrangements held together by a particularly spellbinding lead vocal from its star. It’s majestic stuff that seems to stand in contrast to the album’s reputation as a glitter-stomping post-disco revelation, but then that might have a lot to do with Cherry’s iconic best-selling single…

Though “Strict Machine” arrives near the end of Cherry’s roster before the electro-heaven-hell double whammy of the dreamy “Forever” and the hostile “Slippage”, one could argue that it provides the album with something of a pre-finale, a last hurrah of deranged pop that achieves the perfect synthesis between the seductive sultriness and propulsive machinery the rest of Goldfrapp’s work had been working towards. As its bassline gurgles underneath sequences of reversed whiplash snares, Alison’s clandestine vocals herald the ecstasy of sexual submission with ice-cold cool that manages to register as sexy without feeling exploitative, Goldfrapp herself emerging as a post-disco queen of arch excess and earning enough of a rapturous response from fans and critics that it was released as a single twice during Cherry’s campaign.

Though all this continued garlanding did translate to something more sizeable in terms of commercial success compared to their first long player, Alison and Will would not quite break through into the mainstream until their third album Supernature, Black Cherry instead doing well enough to earn a reputation amongst pop nerds as a best-kept-secret until album three arrived a couple of years later and allowed the rest of the world to catch up with their decadent charms. Truth be told, Cherry always felt a little too queer and robust to really engage with mainstream pop niceties anyway, even if it did help provide a step towards their becoming the electro-pop bop mavens we know them to be now, an obvious example being the opening synth line of their mega hit “Ooh La La” playfully mirroring that which opens “Strict Machine” before heading into a lighter, cleaner sonic milieu. In short, it is a rough, glitter-flecked diamond of sinful majesty, an ode to Dionysian excess for club kids and pop fans alike that still retains its imperious reputation as one of the best albums to see release in the 2000s.

Now, I wonder if I can convince my landlord to install a pole in my living room…

xxxo

What do you think about Black Cherry? Do you have a favourite song or moment from this particular era of Goldfrapp’s career, or are you more like Elliot Page‘s character in Hard Candy? Leave a comment below and let me kn0w…