An Otherworldly Encounter With Goldfrapp

Captain’s Log, Stardate: 322356.35. Our current mission was diverted Tuesday by strange and beautiful sounds emanating from the El Rey Theatre, where British musical entity Goldfrapp held a crowd captive for almost an hour with mysterious siren songs of dystopia and bizarre romance.

Closer inspection revealed the entity to be a symbiont: singer-instrumentalist Alison Goldfrapp and keyboardist Will Gregory, accompanied by three musicians playing violin, keyboards, drums, guitar and viola.

According to the ship’s musicologist, Goldfrapp’s atmospheric manipulations (imprinted on its debut collection, “Felt Mountain”) drew from classical music and film scores, which have also inspired trip-hop and other electronic-dance forms. Indeed, the propulsive “Utopia” recalled the late-20th-century group Portishead, but Goldfrapp’s cabaret-esque works are less beat-driven and more dramatic.

Using three microphones, Goldfrapp manipulated her icy-yet-ravishing vocals from a throaty purr to a spooky wail. Yet the music, for all its otherworldliness, was quite human, evoking the beauty of nature and love while hinting at their underlying dangers. The group even showed a flash of humor with a slowed-down take on the ancient Olivia Newton-John hit “Physical.”

The entity soon disappeared, leaving even seasoned crew members feeling slightly bereft. Reluctantly resuming our mission, we imagined Goldfrapp roaming the galaxy, enchanting the universe one world at a time.