*** Placebo

WITHOUT YOU I'M NOTHING

(Virgin)

Placebo's irresistibly trashy new single, "Pure Morning," sounds a little like gay minstrels the Frogs -- if they jacked the beat from the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" to lay down sarcastic lust-and-revulsion nursery rhymes, then toured the nation's hockey arenas. The rest of "Without You I'm Nothing" is about half as much fun -- it's a classically bummed-out second album, where even the fashion-forward noise jams have an air of sad-star road fatigue. Ambi-sexual frontman Brian Molko's shivery voice, somewhere between Rush's Geddy Lee and News Radio's David Foley, is an acquired taste, and the world just doesn't need more smack-cabaret soliloquies like "The Crawl." But "Ask for Answers" is a yearning, rainy ballad in the James vein, as sublime as Corinne Day's amber-hued cover photo. And on "Burger Queen," Molko serenades a street full of misfits and hustlers, cruising at the low end of the service economy, with the tenderness that comes from self-recognition: "Slightly bemused by the total rejection/Came to the world by Caesarean section/Dreams of a place with a better selection/ Dreams of a face that is purer perfection."

-- Alex Pappademas