Their timeless majesties impress

Over the years I'd heard bits and pieces of Goldfrapp and thought, gee, for newfangly electronic music, that's kind of nice! But then I found their new album, Seventh Tree, streaming on AOL Music...and now it's gone, and I'm seriously missing it. (So, I just bought it, which means their evil plan worked!) The album opens with a nylon-string guitar and then Alison Goldfrapp's voice comes in -- and she's a real singer -- with something unintelligible about clowns, followed by a surge of strings and heartbreaking sustained chords. it's like the Cocteau Twins driving down Abbey Road. (Although that's the only song with garbly lyrics.) Ms. Goldfrapp is a breathtakingly pretty fashion chameleon, like a character in a movie about a rock star, but a really good movie. Their music energizes me (which I need), but also: every now and then, some British music comes along that encapsulates my long-distance (haven't been there in 10 years) anglophilia. The Beatles do it, no matter what the song. The Stones do it even better in some ways, capturing punk anger as well as stately home debauchery. The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" does it. Odd music that I've picked up there still brings it back, like a 45 I'm still carrying around of Japan covering "I Second that Emotion." And even the perfect adorableness of Rockpile did it, with their 80s charm and faithful 50s rock vibe. What it's capturing is how I feel about London, which is a place I went often in my youth, but there's also something timeless and sexy in a been-around-hundreds-of-years way. Like, dudes in tight pants shopping in a used bookstore near the Portrait Gallery and then going to see the Small Faces, but flash back and they would be poets in velvet waistcoats, headed to an assignation. I know, it's a fantasy, but Goldfrapp and many others fulfill it. Here they are in the woods, with their new single "A&E."