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Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory are a couple of talented musicians and... nymphomaniacs. Their typical day goes something like this: wake up at half-past eleven in the morning when the sun's shadow is too weak to cover their sleep. Breakfast with cherry jam and honey butter, then he sees her all smeared with jam and they make love for the first time in the morning. Then down to the bungalow lost in the fields, playing moog and piano until late at night, sampling Barry and loving each other orally with Morricone playing in the background. They have everything they need, thanks also to his father's inheritance. In the evening, they play together, him on the piano and her with her splendid silver-slut voice, in the most compromising bars of the Bristol Veneer Surface in da Black.
But one day, the sweet harmonic movement of their placid life gets a jolt. "But do you love me?" Alison asks, almost panting while they are screwing above his DJ station. "I don't know, I really don't know, actually... yes, maybe. But tell me, oh muse, how can I prove it to you?" Then Alison, with her siren voice and lynx body, whispers in his left ear: "Write. Write me a record, for me, for my voice, for my sexual desire. If you are up to it, you will also be able to love me." So she gently moves away from his body and gets dressed, then smokes a menthol cigarette and, looking at him with a disarming coldness in her eyes: "No more sex until you make my record." A few months later "Felt Mountain" is born. A record in search of lost passion, in which Gregory attempts to describe that cold look he saw in her eyes. And then Alison snow eyes: all a startle, and her voice is blood mist, and his Nino Rota-like strings are male fire, and she howls with the help of the vocoder and he modulates the vocoder while sipping a frequency analyzer. They seem like an even sicker version of Portishead, but it's all a trip. "There's no damn hip-hop, love," she chirps, squeezing his neck with her hands.
And "Lovely head," like all the songs on the record, is born this way. He enters the bungalow at 3 am with a lit cigar, starts whistling as if he were on the set of "A Fistful of Dollars," handling those ancient analog synths of strings, then she enters completely naked and sings in front of the microphone in the throes of an agonizing crisis of physical love. Then Gregory, overcome with desire, prostrates himself, violet in the face, over a digital harpsichord and plays his canon in G minor, exhausted from desire. Meanwhile, Alison weaves allusive, suffering lyrics, writes words for the sake of alliteration, sexual verses that she then screams softly, more anguished than Fiona Apple, like on "Paper bag" (which she pronounces "peipappep"), and she always looks at him naked from the back of the bungalow). Months of electronic trip, noir, a bit sadistic, and a bit masochistic. But Will Gregory Peck does not stop and composes with the skeleton of a jazz devoured by years and smoke, like "Horse tears," which Alison dedicates to him who now cries with desire, like a horse. Her voice calling him scornfully: "lalalalalalà, lalalà... lalà!" like in the soundtrack of Rosemary's Baby, but more ambient, more electro, and she increasingly slutty.
When the record is finally finished, he, now dripping with sweat, hands it over to her and the music world (in the year of our Lord, 2000), after a certainly meticulous mixing. She looks at the record, then looks at him, kisses his chin fervently, and leaves satisfied. The following year it will be sex, cherry jam on nipples, concerts, orchestras, voluptuous BMW commercials, and the spell will last forever, at least until they feel like making another record. But the same spell will never be repeated again, and I am referring to the two shitty albums they made afterward. Because by then the passion is gone, and only the desire to screw remains.
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
01 Lovely Head (03:51)
It starts in my belly
Then up to my heart
Into my mouth I can't keep it shut
Do you recognize the smell
Is that how you tell
Us apart
I fool myself
To sleep and dream
Nobody's here
No-one but me
So cool
You're hardly there
Why can't this be killing you
Frankenstein would want your mind
Your lovely head
Your lovely head
02 Paper Bag (04:08)
No time to fuck
But you like the rush
And where would we
Be without sums
Deals we make
Brown paper bag makes for a hat
When it rains on
Your head mate
Cheers for that
When the world stops for snow
When you laugh
I'm inside
Your mouth
Baboons and birds
Sucking the sun
With the weight of you dear
I forgot
03 Human (04:38)
They fall
From your mouth
Propelled by your belly
And your tongue
I shiver when you shake
And fold into jelly
I think I loved you more than me
Are you human
Or a dud
Are you human
Or d'you make it up
My baby cherry slipped
Pass me through your fingertips
Throw me down like an old rag
I'm not standing
Don't look back
Are you human
Or d'you make it up
They went searching
For your body
They went looking but there's nobody
Who smells like you
Who looks like you
Your not human, too
04 Pilots (04:32)
armored cars sail the sky
they're pink at dawn
if i lived forever you
just wouldn't be
so beautiful as the sun
when it shines
all over the world
we're pilots watching stars
the world preoccupied
we're pilots watching stars
who do we think we are
ice and clouds shimmer outside
rain just falls
at magic hour
it's just the sound
of you and me
time twitching
murmurs of
our friendly machine
we're pilots watching stars
the world preoccupied
we're pilots watching stars
who do we think we are
05 Deer Stop (04:09)
Deer stop bottle in a shell
Shoot a thousand stars over me
Say my name whisper it
I am deliciously wired
I am falling in a cloud
Shoot a thousand stars over me
Say my name
Whisper it
08 Utopia (04:20)
"It's a strange day
No colours or shapes
No sound in my head
I forget who I am
When I'm with you
There's no reason
There's no sense
I'm not supposed to feel
I forget who I am
I forget
Fascist baby
Utopia, utopia
My dog needs new ears
Make his eyes see forever
Make him live like me
Again and again
Fascist baby
Utopia, utopia
My dog needs new ears
I'm wired to the world
That's how I know everything
I'm super brain
That's how they made me
Fascist baby
Utopia, utopia"
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By francesco12
An impressive debut by Goldfrapp with this album, dated back to 2000, breaking into the music scene with a soft-pop-rock characterized by dreamy, melancholic, and visionary atmospheres.
A magical and evocative album, light-years away from their second effort, the maligned "Black Cherry," where the psychedelic and proto-punk components took over, effectively nullifying the foundations from which they started.
