Advertisement

In rotation: Goldfrapp’s ‘The Singles’

Share

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

In rotation: Goldfrapp’s ‘The Singles.’ A series in Sunday Calendar about what Times writers & contributors are listening to right now...


Advertisement

Alison Goldfrapp has exhibited two personas in her last decade-plus as the frontwoman of the electro-chic collaboration with composer Will Gregory that bears her name. Over the course of five albums, the British singer has been a blackberry-lipped robot-vixen, the kind that might throat you with her heel, only to drift away uninterested a minute later. She’s also been a pagan goddess, drawing wisdom from unlikely sources, like the fugue of the dance floor. It’s most exciting when she combines the two, but no matter what mode she’s operating in, there’s a mesmerizing detachment to it all, her breathy soprano on the verge of slipping into a trance.

Goldfrapp’s first singles collection, due in early February, is a tour through the outfit’s luxe disco hits and the more conceptual pockets of dance music in the ’00s (which also means some unavoidable flashes of datedness). Two new songs at the end of the batch — especially the drowsily rapturous “Yellow Halo” — bode well for Goldfrapp’s next step, which, if these are any indication, might be more ambient music in the vein of 2008’s “Seventh Tree.”

Goldfrapp

‘The Singles’

(Astralwerks)

ALSO:

An Appreciation: Etta James

In rotation: Kids These Days’ ‘Hard Times’

Advertisement

In rotation: The Weeknd’s ‘Echoes of Silence’

--Margaret Wappler

Advertisement