| · Second full-length album from post-trip-hop duo featuring singer, composer and keyboardist Allison Goldfrapp and composer Will Gregory.
Black Cherry is an album of cunningly calculated duplicity, divided evenly between throbbing electroclash and dreamy post-trip-hop. In retrospect, we can now see Goldfrapp’s 2000 masterpiece, Utopia, as having closed an era begun by Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, completing the slow sublimation (or, some would claim, dilution) of hip-hop in Western pop.
Half the tracks on Black Cherry continue this quiet work: sensuous, ethereal and uncompromisingly intelligent in the balancing of elements from across the spectrum of 20th century music. The other half, trashily sexy, is more than simply retro: it deliberately revisits the place where it all began in the ’70s, fusing Afro-American funk with Kraftwerk. Now, however, the result isn’t Grandmaster Flash but an alternate past of pop, where Giorgio Moroder stayed with Donna Summer to collaborate with Brian Eno and Bootsy Collins.
I prefer the quieter tracks, of course, "Hairy Trees" being the standout there, but there’s no denying the subtly inventive energy of "Train" and others.
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