Dance duo tries on a new, folkier sound

Some of the time, it does. In fact, the moments that pay off best are those when Goldfrapp swerves furthest away from its glimmering, bass-heavy dance sound of old. "Clowns," which opens the album, is not only the best song on "Seventh Tree," it's also the one that sounds furthest removed from the glam, Bowie-esque sound that made Goldfrapp's name. A rippling, gorgeous ballad, "Clowns" instead sounds like the lovechild of Joni Mitchell and the Cocteau Twins, borrowing acoustic guitar riffs and pop smarts from the former and its crooning, dream-like sound from the latter. Alison Goldfrapp's voice is especially unrecognizable, her trademark ice-cold, dominatrix demeanor traded in for a more affected, strained, almost Joanna Newsom-esque vocal style.

While "Clowns" may be the most extreme reinvention of Goldfrapp's sound on the album, it is far from the only successful one. Also of note is the charmingly rickety "Eat Yourself," which glides along on dusty samples and another charmingly awkward, delicate vocal performance from Alison Goldfrapp. More sonically complex is the sleek, seductive "Cologne Ceronne Houdini" (that's a mouthful), one of the few songs on the album to bridge past and present styles and the only one to do it well. With its stately string hooks, thumping bass line and silken, sultry vocals, it sounds like it could be an outtake from Goldfrapp's last album. As a result, despite being a perfectly decent song, it doesn't really fit into the low-key mood of "Seventh Tree." The same goes for "A&E," the album's lead single. True, it is an almost perfectly written pop song, a lush mid-tempo ballad with a gorgeous verse melody and a chorus that won't leave your head for days, but it's so horrendously catchy compared to the rest of the record that it sticks out a mile. It's like stumbling across a Madonna song on a Metallica album. That's not to say it's bad, but on a record characterized mainly by tasteful restraint, the jubilantly sweet sugar rush of "A&E" just doesn't fit.

Actually, "tastefully restrained" is what Goldfrapp wishes its album were, because the biggest weakness of "Seventh Tree" is that the duo too frequently confuses "tastefully restrained" for "blandly boring." Far gone are the theatrical, intricately detailed soundscapes of yesteryear, and in its place are more traditional song structures, occasionally repetitious melodies and a markedly restricted sonic palette. As shown above, this bare-bones musical style can pay off, as with the dreamy "Clowns," in which a beautifully ethereal ambience is achieved with just three instruments. But equally often, songs fall on just the wrong side of that tricky line between low key and dreary. Case in point: the droningly repetitive "Caravan Girl," which is so simplistic it almost sounds like a nursery rhyme. "Run away, we'll run away you and me" is hardly the most complex or brilliant lyric ever thought up, and in "Caravan Girl" it's only repeated, you know, like 20 times. Equally disappointing is "Little Bird," which tries to meld Goldfrapp's past and present styles, without realizing that grafting processed, dance-pop vocals over a folk music backdrop sounds very, very silly.

If I sound really damning, I don't want to, because it's not that these songs are bad per se - it's just that they're not very interesting, and they represent a serious step down in musical complexity from Goldfrapp's last few albums. On its 2003 breakthrough, "Black Cherry," the duo showed that dance music need not be repetitive or boring, flawlessly matching swirling, Eno-esque sound tapestries to infectious pop melodies. This brilliant balancing act between experimental and accessible is largely what has made the band so successful, but it's a trick it hasn't pulled off on "Seventh Tree." Even so, in this download-a-few-songs-and-screw-the-album age that we live in, "Seventh Tree" is a perfect fit. Download "Clowns," "Eat Yourself" and "A&E," drop your jaw at the fact that one sounds like Kate Bush, another sounds like Nina Simone and the last sounds almost like Sheryl Crow, and revel in the results of a band in the throes of musical reinvention.