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Gravity the Seducer - Ladytron
Metascore
68 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 20 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 12 out of 20
  2. Mixed: 8 out of 20
  3. Negative: 0 out of 20
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  1. The Independent on Sunday (UK)
    Sep 12, 2011
    90
    As always, Ladytron make the world feel a more haunted, evocative, romantic place. Faultless.
  2. Clash Music
    Sep 9, 2011
    90
    By stripping back the layers of overbearing electronic production of the past, they've recorded an album of lush and elegant pop music, beguiling and gloriously cinematic.
  3. Blurt Magazine
    Sep 9, 2011
    90
    If Witching Hour was the finest apple the band ever produced, this is their finest orange. But as a whole, it probably is their best and most well-rounded record.
  4. No Ripcord
    Sep 14, 2011
    80
    Please don't let any negative first impressions put you off though, as it just might be the album that Ladytron have been working towards for a decade.
  5. NOW Magazine
    Sep 9, 2011
    80
    Hard-driving Helen Marnie-sung tune Melting Ice, meanwhile, is surely Ladytron's steely attempt at self-aware irony.
  6. BBC Music
    Sep 9, 2011
    80
    Gravity the Seducer isn't the ultimate Ladytron album, a title which still belongs to Velocifero. It's too uncertain for that, with the slight wobbliness of someone injured learning to walk again.
  7. PopMatters
    Nov 7, 2011
    70
    Gravity The Seducer finds its place as Ladytron's most hypnotic record to date--one that has no resident bangers, yet doesn't seem to care.
  8. Absolute Punk (Staff reviews)
    Sep 29, 2011
    70
    Gravity The Seducer has its fair share of tremendous moments, but unfortunately those moments begin to lose their gloss when entangled with fragments of inconveniently placed filler.
  9. Under The Radar
    Sep 27, 2011
    70
    There's a decade's worth of sophistication and maturity that has gone into building Ladytron's fortress of solitude, but maybe it's time to hear what it sounds like when it all melts down.
  10. All Music Guide
    Sep 14, 2011
    70
    This may be Ladytron's most difficult album, but it's also one of their most cohesive.
  11. New Musical Express (NME)
    Sep 12, 2011
    70
    It's masochistically delightful.
  12. The A.V. Club
    Sep 13, 2011
    67
    While Gravity is a bit cold to the touch, that wintry feel is also a big part of Ladytron's charm.
  13. Q Magazine
    Sep 21, 2011
    60
    Elsewhere they veer off into roboid electro, but a certain lack of variety costs points. [Oct 2011, p.124]
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  14. Mojo
    Sep 19, 2011
    60
    Gravity the Seducer aims to be the great leap forward but still falls a little short. [Oct 2011, p.98]
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  15. Pitchfork
    Sep 13, 2011
    60
    Gravity the Seducer is a transitional album bearing the growing pains and separation anxiety that we usually associate with bands that are in between periods of true inspiration.
  16. Slant Magazine
    Sep 12, 2011
    60
    Gravity the Seducer is by some measure more focused than Ladytron's previous efforts. Or a little more fatigued. It's sometimes a little hard to tell when the music is so resolutely detached and android-vague.
  17. The Guardian
    Sep 9, 2011
    60
    The problem with creating one of the last decade's great songs--2005's Destroy Everything You Touch--is that subsequent work will always be judged against that yardstick, so despite its undeniable worth, Gravity the Seducer leaves an "if only..." in its wake.
  18. Spin
    Sep 9, 2011
    60
    The resolutely midtempo album peaks with the ghostly "Ace of Hz" (recycled from a 
recent greatest-hits record), which polishes chillwave's hazy psychedelia into glossy yet dense ice sculptures.
  19. Drowned In Sound
    Sep 12, 2011
    50
    For diehard fans Gravity The Seducer is replete with pleasing moments. For fans of novel musical statements, not so much. Listen, feel your mind wander, forget.
  20. Uncut
    Sep 9, 2011
    40
    Rigidity is a hallmark of electropop, from Numan to Miss Kittin, but Ladytron's plodding rhythms and banal melodies straightjacket their songs. [Sep 2011, p.88]
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User Reviews

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User Score
7.9 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 14 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 4
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 4
  3. Negative: 1 out of 4
  1. FerdinandCastle
    10
    This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view. Un sonido mas envolvente, profundo y sosegado es como puede describirse a "Gravity the Seducer", el melancólico estilo de Ladytron sigue presente y los sonidos ecoicos se engrandecen dando la sensación de estar en un espacio abierto a la naturaleza. Canciones clave: "White Elephant"," White Gold", "Ace of Hz" y "Ninety Degrees"… Full Review »
  2. kowalski
    3
    I was under the impression music should always go forward, evolve, sometimes borrow from other artists' past experiences, but not too much. Ladytron's newest album sounds like it was heavily inspired by early Ace of Base - naively synthetic, stompy pop with no melody around. Tracks lack in originality and the are too similar to each other, resulting in complete boredom of the listener.… Full Review »
  3. 8dr13nbl3ck
    8
    The fact that there is no title track is an instant bonus. Many would resort to such measures by their pentad effort, if not sooner. Cheers to Lt for not throwing the towel in. You may notice, however, that Ninety Degrees is unofficially the title track. As for the keystrokes themselves- you don’t see the plowing industrial bass and stadium rocking drums from Velocifero (Black Cat, Burning Up, nor do you find the glamorous yet stoic punch of Light and Magic (Startup Chime). The album more closely resembles Witching Hour with its wispy riffs and luminous choruses, along with a little bit of 604’s patent innocence. Thematically, it is synched up tight. Consistency is something that comes only with maturity, and here that is exactly the case. If you’re looking for Playgirl or Seventeen though, good luck. There’s no glossy, candidly Euro-trash veneer to this material. The initial radio singles (Ace of Hz and White Elephant) are exactly what you might expect of them. They are not too danceable yet not too melancholy. They effectively showcase the band for who they are, while hinting at the extremes to be found if one delves deeper- and one certainly should. The video for White Elephant seems a collision of Black Swan and The Great Gatsby- and a lovely one at that. The track’s audio kicks the album off with more range than you generally get out of Helen. Her choral training has all but reached a plateau. This track, along with several others, certainly justify the Dune-esque mystique of the album cover. The chords read like Bacharach interpreting Poe. Then there’s the other pillar of promotion- fans were pretty irked by the Ace of Hz single being pawned off as an EP. I don’t blame them. Where are the B-sides? I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and blame the record company. A sexy art band should be above deadweight gimmicks like that. The song is interesting enough. It’s a head nodder at points for sure, but more importantly it has a reprise to sign the album off. The final track’s link to earlier moments and its ride-off-into-the-sunset mood accompany the title perfectly. The last time I saw this work, though not in true finale context, was on The Prodigy’s Invaders Must Die. If you’re looking for Commodore Rock or Nuhorizons- yikes... where do I start? Moon Palace is a pure let down. It is a blatant short-selling of Mira’s true hypnotic droning. The track’s placement is clearly a tactic to increase expectation for the immediately upcoming Altitude Blues, where Aroyo rises to thirty-seven thousand feet, to deliver her special brand of elegantly drab prose over a meteor shower of a beat. This song is the before-its-time 80’s blockbuster movie theme that never was (a nod to Tangerine Dream perhaps). Unfortunately though, it is in English. I was hoping for a lot more of that paralyzingly crisp employment of her native Bulgarian. I was also hoping for the sort of juvenile delivery of feminist values found in Flicking Your Switch. But again, as the girls push into their mid-thirties, we can’t expect to keep getting the exact same potent whimsy that put them on the map. Ambulances comes immediately after ‘Blues, haunting us all with another shining example of Helen’s ability to crash ships with the mythical purity of her vocal chords. The lyrics contain nothing other than her trademark struggle between longing and dismissal and the ethereal effects applied to her self-backing vocals are spot on. Meanwhile, a dragging high-hat gives it almost a dirty-South club anthem feel, which is the definition of irony. The instrumental track Ritual has some fun momentum, but could easily be mistaken for a justifiably B-sided Blondie track. These folks have always been New-wave at their core- just with sprinkles of Breakbeat and Trance. Across the entire album, you see a substantial similarity to the new Moby disc, Destroyed, and to Arcade Fire’s recent effort, The Suburbs- mainly in the use of intermittent plinks of full-bodied existential caterwauling. Those two artists can’t even be mentioned without the Eno connection becoming abundantly clear for the whole troupe of artists. Daniel, Reuben, and the two stone-foxes they call band-mates, certainly belong with the likes of the old guard of English and German innovators that popularized syth-pop/rock in the 70s. Post-millennial as they may be, we see them a decade deep in bit meddling, and keeping this thing called Ladytron fresh.… Full Review »
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