This came out in 2003 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
If Kraftwerk and Abba got blitzed on absinthe, did the nasty in a Berlin crackhouse and then named the baby after a Roxy Music song, Ladytron is what their music would sound like.
A co-ed quartet featuring two seductively frosty female vocalists backed by a pair of electronica knob-twiddlers — Lady + Tron, get it? — these fashionably spooky Euro electro-clashers are a Human League for today’s post-millennial world. And their second album Light & Magic is — as the title suggests — a more colourful and effects-laden spectacle then their impressive 2001 debut 604. As the beatboxes skitter-skatter, the basslines boing-boing and the synthesizers bleep-bloop, the chic chanteuses practically exhale plumes of dry ice with every Teutonic-inflected monotone and breathy whisper that they send drifting disinterestedly over paranoid-android disco grooves like True Mathematics, Seventeen and Cease2Exist. And as the final throbbing bassline fades into the night, they have just one question to ask: Don’t you want me, baby? Mamma mia.
