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They’re still flogging the same old dead horse.
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They’re still flogging the same old dead horse.
Ahh, the bog standard Greatest Hits compilation arrives with a couple of new songs thrown in for good measure. We must be nearing Christmas. If you’re a fan of Placebo, you’ll buy this because of the two new songs and enjoy your little trip down Memory Lane into the realm of pop/rock mediocrity; whilst the rest of us will just ignore it, as we have the rest of their output. Here we have 19 songs taken from 6 albums and they’re in chronological order too; so we get a brief overview of how Molko and co. burst onto the scene filled with teenage angst, harmonic power chords, some electronic trickery and a celebrity endorsement sticker from David Bowie and then followed it up with, well, pretty much the same thing over and over again.
All the singles are here; including Nancy Boy, You Don’t Care About Us, Special K, Pure Morning and Picture This. You also get their duet with Bowie, Without You I’m Nothing (how very true) and there are those two new songs as well, but alas they’re still flogging the same old dead horse and neither of them is really worth getting excited about.
A lot of bands find that, after a while, they need to try and reinvent themselves somewhat to revitalize the passion and the music created within the unit, sadly Placebo are either too lazy or too afraid to even change their image, let alone their sound as they’re still wearing the same old Robert Smith cast-offs they wore in 1996. Ok, so Robert Smith still wears the same clothes he wore back in 1982, but at least a few of his songs are distinguishable from one another.
Having said that, I don’t find anything Placebo have done to be completely offensive to listen to, but even this collection of singles can’t convert me into a true fan and I doubt that it will convert many others either.
Words : MAC