In 1977, Bianca Jagger celebrated her 30th birthday by riding a white horse across the dancefloor of Studio 54 in New York. One suspects that this striking image must have had quite a formative impact on Alison Goldfrapp. For the past five years, her shows and videos have presented a nightclub world filled with randy horse creatures. Wolf and dog men have routinely cavorted around the singer, a polymorphously perverse mistress of all she imagines.

Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, her musical partner, cannily reinvented glam and disco as a provocative art project, not just as an exercise in kitsch nostalgia. For their fourth album, however, Goldfrapp seem to have packed up their glitterballs and tried to get even closer to nature. Pictures have emerged of the singer demurely nuzzling up to a giant owl that could have wandered out of a medieval pageant. The opening track, Clowns, has acoustic guitar, some woozy strings and Goldfrapp rising ethereally from the woodland mist. The atmosphere is scrupulously dreamy, sylvan and very redolent of Kate Bush and of Beth Gibbons's album Out of Season. Old Angela Carter novels may well be scattered across the dewy glade.

It's a highly seductive start. But, predictably, Goldfrapp's idyll is not quite as straightforward as it first appears. For a start, the duo's meticulous approach means that the acoustic instruments have been sampled and given a futuristic sheen. To Goldfrapp, folk music is unreal, not rootsy. It can mingle curiously with 1980s Europop (as on the outstanding Happiness), or with some residual traces of disco (most overtly on Cologne Cerrone Houdini).

The cumulative effect is very clever and disingenuously pretty, making Seventh Tree the pair's most appealing album yet. Goldfrapp is no more convincing as a romantic sprite than she was as a sensuous beast. Her last two albums were immensely successful, but they felt too calculated to be truly erotic. Nevertheless, when she lets rip on the radiant Cocteau Twins homage that is Little Bird, the idea of a mildly psychedelic laboratory experiment becomes irrelevant. Arch rural conceptualising be damned - it just sounds lovely.

(EMI)

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