Last I checked, our puritanical country had yet to accept naked asses on CD covers: a glimpse of anything more than the proverbial carpenter's smile guaranteed the album an airbrushed Stateside reissue, a paper baggie, or a strategically applied sticker. Yet Placebo's latest gets away with an unobstructed view of female hindquarters, and I think I know why: see, the chick's dead. She's a ghost. You can see right through that ass!

Sorry, I'm just fascinated by the logic of it. First, some art director (to be specific, one JB Mondino) figures that the title of Placebo's nostalgia-themed Sleeping with Ghosts requires literal visualization. He thus blesses us with one of the worst non-metal album covers of all time: a guy in artfully torn blue jeans making out with a semi-transparent Photoshopped nude. Then, U.S. retailers greenlight the etude on account of the girl being a specter. And to complete the circle of idiocy, here I am going on about it, instead of briefing you on the album's highs and lows.

Fact is, there aren't that many. No peaks, no gorges, just a steady oscillation between adequate and inspired. Sleeping with Ghosts is a remarkably level collection of guitar pop, simultaneously less glammy and less pungent than Placebo's earlier stuff. It whooshes by on clockwork beats, precision guitarwork (their way with the dun-dun-dun-dun downstroke makes Interpol sound like a jam band) and purely decorative bits of dissonance. Yet, if not for some Britishisms and Brian Molko's endearingly bratty whine, this could have been Duncan Sheik.

The album has two assured rockers ("The Bitter End" and "Plasticine"), two not-bad ballads ("I'll Be Yours" and "Centrefolds") and even a great single called "This Picture", where Molko gets to call his departed lover "forbidden snowflake" and "angelic fruitcake." Which brings us to the genuinely bad news: in these days of stunted complacency on both sides of the Atlantic, it's hard to grumble against artists' newfound political focus. It's just that Molko might not be the ideal man for the job. He is, how you say, not very bright. That's rarely a problem with glam rockers-- leave them in a room with a tome of Faulkner and out comes Michael Stipe-- but the eruptions of schoolboy righteousness that dot Sleeping with Ghosts are skirting self-parody.

The title song, marked by the abundant and irony-free use of the word "soulmate," boasts a couplet worth reproducing here in full: "This one world vision/ Turns us into compromise/ What good's religion/ When it's each other we despise?" Take that, Pope! Globalization and consumerism get a more detailed lashing in "Protect Me From What I Want", an otherwise perfectly agreeable rave-up in 6/8. When not drilling the catchphrase into our brains, Molko dispenses such pearls as, "Corporate America wakes/ Coffee Republic and cakes." Which is a pity, because the distorted harmonica solo wailing away below this drivel is one of Placebo's best musical moments to date. Suddenly, the transparent form on the cover gains a meaning: Sleeping with Ghosts invites a conscious separation of form and content. It's dead but pretty but dead.

-Michael Idov, April 21st, 2003