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IVH: Placebo / Without You I'm Nothing [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-02
Tonight’s selections from Placebo’s second album, 1998’s Without You I’m Nothing.
In ye olde days of the late ‘90s, a little trio called Placebo burst onto the English rock music scene in a storm of androgyny, unrepentant queer sexuality, and equally unrepentant substance use. After breaking out with eponymous 1996 debut record (featuring top five single Nancy Boy), Placebo were able to earn themselves the dubious honour of being titled “the filthiest band in Britain” as well as the legitimate honour of being invited to play at David Bowie’s 50th birthday party in New York. The second record, Without You I’m Nothing, cemented Placebo’s status in alternative rock and marked the difficult passage of an indie band becoming a major rock act – with all the behind-the-scenes growing pains and confusion thereof. As bassist/guitarist, Stefan Olsdal, encapsulated in the October 1998 issue of Guitar Magazine, the album was “harder and softer… louder and quieter!” — Happy
Every You Every Me
Placebo introduced the world to Without You I’m Nothing with the music video for “Pure Morning”, in which frontman Brian Molko plays a character who seems to be toying with the idea of throwing himself off the roof of Savoy Place. Police cars fill the pavement below, reporters address their cameras, crowds of people look up. Then he lurches forward and falls for a few seconds before calmly walking down the side of the building. “It’s a song about coming down when the rest of the world is waking up,” Molko explained to Billboard at the time. “How many times have you come out of a club when the sun is coming up and others are going to work? You feel dislocated. You just want someone to slip their arm around you and make slumber easier.” Both the song and video set the tone for the rest of Without You I’m Nothing – an album that concerns itself with impulse and the periods of reflection that follow it. Written largely about drugs and intimacy and the ways in which those things can intersect, especially within queer spaces, Without You I’m Nothing takes an intense and sometimes dark look at desire. Heartbreak and heroin weave in and out of each other thematically in “My Sweet Prince”, while that feeling of the floor dropping out from under you that often accompanies addiction – whether it’s to a feeling given to you by a person or a substance – is something that runs through the whole album. Without You I’m Nothing is simultaneously harsh and tender, peeling back the bratty distortion plastered over their self-titled debut to address the sores themselves. — Vice
Pure Morning
The songs that the band brought to the sessions were noticeably stronger than those written for the first record. These spanned the distortion-drenched locomotive Brick Shithouse and the supercharged thump of Scared of Girls to the shimmering Ask For Answers and the gothic, brooding arpeggiation of My Sweet Prince. While the songwriting was more wide-ranging, the hooks were plentiful. Listen to the yearning Fender Bass VI riff of You Don’t Care About Us and the mesmerising D♯ chime of opener Pure Morning and expect them to be comfortably lodged in your head for years to come. [...] Osborne was hugely impressed by the 26 year-old’s abilities. “Brian totally had his own style, his own way of playing,” he tells Guitar.com. “I mean, I think that’s the thing about Placebo. They’ve got this very unique sound. Stefan too, he would be playing bass chords on the Fender VI. That made it difficult to mix the low end sometimes but, together, their whole ethos and sound was attractive.” The album’s 12 songs sketched out a multi-hued postmortem of a relationship, digging into suffering via the depressive plod of The Crawl and the thorny swing of Summer’s Gone. But at the album’s core was an optimistic, radiant little gem that motored along with a headstrong chordal thrust and seemed destined for rock radio airplay. The buoyant Every You Every Me was an obvious single and a perfect counterpoint to the anguish that surrounded it. It remains Osborne’s favourite from the record. “I’m a sucker for a good single.” — Guitar.com
My Sweet Prince
After the manic post-punk of Placebo, the band went with producer Steve Osborne with the intent to create a more modern, Pro Tools-driven record. Having “a foot in the dance camp and a foot in the rock camp,” Osborne was the man at the time for it, as expounded by frontman Brian Molko for MTV’s 120 Minutes. Molko would later express mixed feelings about both the album’s production and their dynamic with Osborne, which purportedly “didn’t spark the way we wanted it to spark.” Yet, this creative unease arguably is exactly what made Without You I’m Nothing what it is – a frustrated, brooding portrait of growing up that Placebo themselves didn’t quite comprehend. — Happy
Without You I'm Nothing (Feat. David Bowie)
The snide and undeniably silly "Pure Morning," is the weakest track on the album (and, surprise-- a mainstream radio hit). It's a cynical take on friendship with the fair sex-- the kind of song that caters to 13 year old guys intimidated into asexuality by the early pubescent developments in their female peers. "A friend in need is a friend in deed/ A friend who bleeds is better/ My friend confessed she passed the test/ And we will never sever," sings Malko, while mindless distortion guitar wallpaper spreads itself thin over metronomic mechanical beats. On a later track, "Scared of Girls"-- the one with the more aggressive Siamese Dream- like guitar squall-- this topic concerning fear of female sexuality is elaborated on just as clumsily. Strangely, Without You I'm Nothing appears to be late '90s alt-rock referencing a lot of early '90s alt-rock-- as if it were some nostalgic trip happening long before its time. Or maybe the record is ahead of its time in the sense that the '90s should be hugely popular around 2010, if the current trend shift patterns hold. — Pitchfork
Scared of Girls
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Ted Danson, Mikey Madison, Blxst and Anderson .Paak (R 11/14/24)
Jimmy Fallon: Cynthia Erivo, Martha Stewart, Travis Fimmel, Emma Willmann (R 11/13/24)
Stephen Colbert: Selena Gomez, Seth Meyers (R 12/3/24)
Seth Meyers: Billy Crystal, Sarah Michelle Gellar (R 12/12/24)
After Midnight: Johnny Pemberton, Nichole Sakura, Matt Braunger (R 11/20/24)
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