With the Golfrapp duo on indefinite hiatus, Flux is a chance for Alison Goldfrapp to get back to what she knows. It is not as though she strayed very far in the long-running electropop duo. Flux is a back-to-basics style album that comes when an artist feels as though they strayed too far from the path. Her second solo album has moments where Goldfrapp strips back the layers of her sound, like Hey Hi Hello, an opening song that reintroduces Goldfrapp to listeners. There is a lightness to Flux which makes it accessible but a little too pop-oriented. It has that vague optimism about it which feels like an inevitability, not an earned spot. It gets better, but those early songs work more if they’re passively listened to on the radio, and not readily relistened to at home. For all the changes Goldfrapp notes around her, very little has changed instrumentally.
Sound & Light suggests there are changes to come, though what they are is for Goldfrapp and only Goldfrapp to know. There is a level of trust to be put into her and the work Flux has in store for listeners. Tracks like Reverberotic are far more interesting than the preceding two songs because the mood is built that much better, and the dance-pop fundamentals are exercised well. It’s the intensity of Reverberotic that’s best of all. Goldfrapp suits the harsher synth style. Hints of some evocative and darker touch are heard towards the end of the third song, and they do continue on Strange Things Happen, though not as confidently. It’s a fairly stripped-back beat, a very safe sound if it were not for the occasional jab of lyrical clarity and questioning. Those are the moments to hold out for, as Flux is set on repeating what Goldfrapp achieved over a decade ago. Doing so dates the project, and hardly offers listeners that daring sound she had promised following Goldfrapp’s hiatus.
Most of the work on Flux is relatively passive. Not aimless, that would be truly troubling, but much of it without a unique riff or purpose. Find Xanadu is the most egregious of all, a downtempo muttering amid a sea of suggestive and potential synth classics. None of these songs live up to that, and hope is dashed relatively early into Flux. Are passive pop songs worse than the tracks which had a little flavour to them, but were ultimately lost in the mix? Possibly. Flux has a generous helping of both problems. Goldfrapp offers very little variety here because upbeat or downtempo is delivered with the same tone. Ordinary Day should be the high point, the uplifting beat of an album which has, up to this point, mused on gloomy times.
But Flux sounds muddled and underwhelmed the whole way through. Go in knowing nothing and come out with reasons never to return. Head into Flux with a deep interest in the Goldfrapp sound and exit with your appetite finished off. Flux hopes to hold itself to all these dreamlike tones but can never convincingly deliver on any of it. Vague club noise which has neither a danceable tempo nor a suggestive, contemplative tone. Very rarely can an album begin and end without departing with any knowledge or information, a thought on life or the wider world. But Flux manages just that. An album where the stylish production is a novelty at first, but it evolves into a far sinister necessity. It becomes a crutch for an album without a message, without anything to impart to its audience. There is no flow to Flux, which would be ironic if it weren’t so disappointing.
