Placebo - Sleeping With Ghosts (2016) Vinyl

Last I checked, our puritanical country had yet to accept naked asses on CD covers: a glimpse of anything more than the proverbial carpenter's smile guaranteed the album an airbrushed Stateside reissue, a paper baggie, or a strategically applied sticker. Yet Placebo's latest gets away with an unobstructed view of female hindquarters, and I think I know why: see, the chick's dead. She's a ghost. You can see right through that ass!

Sorry, I'm just fascinated by the logic of it. First, some art director (to be specific, one JB Mondino) figures that the title of Placebo's nostalgia-themed Sleeping with Ghosts requires literal visualization. He thus blesses us with one of the worst non-metal album covers of all time: a guy in artfully torn blue jeans making out with a semi-transparent Photoshopped nude. Then, U.S. retailers greenlight the etude on account of the girl being a specter. And to complete the circle of idiocy, here I am going on about it, instead of briefing you on the album's highs and lows.

Fact is, there aren't that many. No peaks, no gorges, just a steady oscillation between adequate and inspired. Sleeping with Ghosts is a remarkably level collection of guitar pop, simultaneously less glammy and less pungent than Placebo's earlier stuff. It whooshes by on clockwork beats, precision guitarwork (their way with the dun-dun-dun-dun downstroke makes Interpol sound like a jam band) and purely decorative bits of dissonance. Yet, if not for some Britishisms and Brian Molko's endearingly bratty whine, this could have been Duncan Sheik.