Oh goody, more electronic music! I can certainly speak intelligibly about this by now, no doubt! And you know what? I think I am slowly becoming a bit more knowledgeable. While re-listening to “Strict Machine,” the thought “I think this might be electroclash!” popped into my head. And then I looked it up, and was vindicated by multiple sources. Discogs. Wikipedia. AllMusic.
Now, don’t ask me to define electroclash in any sort of concrete musical terms, because I’ll fall flat on my face. Actually, you know what, let me try: every Goldfrapp song I’ve heard contains a simulacrum of the “Boogie Chillen”/”Shake Your Hips”/”La Grange” riff. You can tell the temptation to just straight-up gank the entirety of “I Feel Love” was strong, so something kinda similar was chosen to get the job done. I can tell you my non-musical impressions of electroclash: Sex. Drugs. Filth. Single-entendre innuendo. Bright neon colors. Relentless energy (see “drugs” above). Soiled glitz. Tarnished glamour. Tight gold lamé. Big hair. Disco, but on the internet. Hated by most, but loved by many. Like disco, the scene was gay- and trans-friendly (in a pre-modern unwoke kinda way), so prejudiced assholes found it an easy target for ridicule.
“Strict Machine” is fun and cool, and more substantial that the trifles offered by Fischerspooner, Peaches, and other flagship electroclash acts. I can’t really explain why I feel that way–maybe it’s because Goldfrapp had already shown their chops on wildly-different first album Felt Mountain. Maybe it’s that Alison Goldfrapp had been in the game for a long time by the time her band donned the electroclash costume–“Strict Machine” dropped a week before she turned 37, and she’d been providing feature vocals on tracks by Orbital and Tricky for nearly a decade by then. From: https://oneyearin2003.wordpress.com/2020/09/19/day-124-goldfrapp-strict-machine/
