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.… Expand

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.