After two sublimely vitriolic albums about the nasty side of English society, it was hard to see what Black Box Recorder could do for an encore. A track on their new album, 'Andrew Ridgely', hints at the surprising answer - they've gone disco. Less surprisingly, they pull it off with aplomb. Passionoia sounds like a great lost classic from the early 1980s, dominated by swirling synthesisers and pulsating dance rhythms. Thankfully, however, the legendary misanthropy of Luke Haines remains gloriously intact. Whether he's dissecting the cult of Diana or the loss of childhood innocence, this perpetually angry young man takes a scalpel to British culture with a verbal skill that's virtually without parallel in modern pop. None of it would work half as well, however, without the deadpan vocals of ice queen Sarah Nixey, who effectively serves as Haines's mouthpiece by delivering his gruesome couplets with an eerie Home Counties precision. The result is a cross between the seediness of Jarvis Cocker and the poise of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, surely a winning combination in anyone's book. Clever, sinister and often unbearably sad, Passionoia is the product of a truly twisted mind. We could do with more albums like it.
