Placebo

Placebo build songs around Brian Molko's high, nasal voice and a guitar sound that stays lean and trebly even at volume. The music is alternative rock with glam in its bones, direct and melodic and often abrasive, and the words go at sexuality, androgyny, dependency and alienation without euphemism.

The arrangements are spare by rock standards: guitar, bass and drums, with synths and electronic textures layered over the top rather than filling every gap. Songs tend to build from a single insistent figure and stay there, worrying at it. The catalogue holds the hard, fast material alongside a long run of slower and bleaker songs, and the band has performed that side of it stripped back and acoustic as well as plugged in. Eight studio albums span from the mid-1990s onward.

Molko and Olsdal founded the band in 1994, having first met at school years earlier, and the two of them have remained its constant core through several changes of drummer. The debut album arrived in 1996 and set the band deliberately against the laddish mood of the era, which is part of why it landed. David Bowie sang on the title track of the second album.

Live, the band fills a big room without thickening the sound. The guitars stay sharp, the voice sits high and exposed above them, and the slower songs are allowed to stay quiet rather than being pushed for effect. It is a rock show that trusts the songs to carry at volume, which is rarer than it sounds.

It is for listeners who like their rock plainly stated and emotionally unguarded, and who would rather hear a band sound like itself than like everything else in the genre.