In their tenth year as a band, the Gossip make their return with a fourth studio album, Music for Men. Frontwoman Beth Ditto is famously fond of laying herself bare, not only across magazine covers but in her heartfelt lyrics and exhilarating stage presence. But Music for Men, with its tongue-in-cheek promise of something full-strength and uncompromising, presents a watered-down impression of a band once proud of challenging conventions.
Dimestore Diamond is a stripped-down and personal opener, with Ditto’s faux-country croon delivering lines about a girl who ‘everybody knows.. ain’t a coal no more’. This first song exposes some small vulnerability in Ditto; its a hymn to trashy insouciance, as well as an exercise in vanity. Current single Heavy Cross follows with the funk guitars that made The Gossip a dancefloor favourite, and 8th Wonder ups the ante with Ditto’s invocation to a ‘choir that’ll never be heard’, combining ballsy punk insistence with a certain melancholy note. However, Ditto’s assertion that ‘if there’s a risk, then I’ll take it’ turns out a lie, as the album descends into unadventurous, repetitive disco debris after these first tracks. Men in Love, pegged as the next single, offers a phoned-in chorus of ‘na na na na, men in love.. with each other’. Perhaps I’m missing the point of a tongue-in-cheek song that plays on preconceptions, but next to the defiant, relentlessly catchy Standing in the Way of Control, this song seems half-hearted and patronising.
The biggest problem with Music for Men is its pace, with Ditto restraining herself when she least needs to. Tracks are bloated with platitude lyrics (‘dance like there’s nobody watching’) and often falling back on ‘ooh’ and ‘aaaaah’ sounds in place of a chorus. Her earth-shattering vocals swallow up whole tracks, offering little variety. The Gossip’s orignal mix of punk outrage and manic disco is tempered here by Rick Rubin’s production, giving them a clinical pop gloss so fashionable in dead-eyed divas like La Roux, but at odds with what originally made The Gossip so special. Music for Men retains some punk swagger, but I’d like to see the kids from Skins try throwing themselves around to these dreary, apathetic tracks, let alone the famously physical presence of Ditto herself.
