Ladytron: Light & Magic : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Ladytron are what the future was going to sound like in 1980. For them, classic rock means Giorgio Moroder and "Warm Leatherette," guitars take a distant second place to video-game noises, and "mechanical," "ice-cold" and "sexy" all mean the same thing. Mira Aroyo and Helena Marnie are the Liverpool quartet's dual vocal droids: Marnie's the cooing pleasure-bot with a heart of zeros and ones, Aroyo's the ghost in the machine without an emotion unit (her deadpan rap in "Nuhorizons" -- in Bulgarian! -- is a wonder of accidental funkiness). There are casual allusions everywhere to the (plastic) fruits of technology: Novotel minisuites, Salt-n-Pepa's "Push It," LCD monitors, vintage house music. "Seventeen" isn't just a vicious little mantra about the construction of desire, it's also a silicon-dry riposte to Kraftwerk's "The Model." And beneath Light and Magic's molded plastic facade, it is ingenious, slyly tuneful New Wave, with buzzing synth melodies chattering at each other like packet switchers.

DOUGLAS WOLK
(RS 905 - Sept. 19, 2002)