Duran Duran
Red Carpet Massacre
(Sony, 2007)

We maintain sentimental attractions to everything we encounter in childhood, and so a current generation of musicians has recently been unearthing the core of feeling within even the most veneer-coated hits of past decades: here the Postal Service’s tender version of Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds”, there Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” made into a lament by Gary Jules, or Camera Obscura’s heartbreaking rendition of ABBA’s “Super Trouper”, and so on. But then there’s Duran Duran, who time has only revealed to be even shallower than was previously thought. And yeah, everybody hates a tourist, especially one who thinks it’s all such a laugh—but what about the tourist that does it for a living? Duran Duran has spent upwards of a quarter century prostrating itself at the alter of Now, whether dancing in the sand in Rio, soundtracking Bond movies, covering Grandmaster Flash, or, in recent years, touring in support of their now nostalgic back catalog. They are our greatest purveyors of disposable decadence, and with Red Carpet Massacre, their 13th studio album, these elite professional tourists hit up the club with Timbaland and Timberlake.

Lead single “Nite-Runner” was picked as such because it was produced by Timbaland, who also sings counterpoint to Justin Timberlake and Simon Le Bon’s chorus duet. Opening with Le Bon’s hilariously redundant couplet, “You’re nocturnal, only come out at night,” the song, like a fair number of current hip-hop hits (50 Cent’s “Ayo Technology”, also featuring Timberlake, Baby Bash and T-Pain’s “Cyclone”), is a leering ode to an unnamed lady of apparently bewildering hotness. Also like a fair number of current hip-hop hits, it’s blessed with Timbaland’s particular brand of percussion-by-bass-and-heavy-breathing, as well as Timberlake’s singularly pelvic falsetto. Timberlake also appears, less successfully, on his own production “Falling Down”, a fairy dust-sprinkled ballad with limp guitar noodles strewn about the background. (Guitarist Andy Taylor split from Duran Duran during the course of recording. Understandable, perhaps, although a member of Duran Duran quitting the band because he doesn’t like the direction it’s going is a bit like a bead quitting a wind chime because it hates getting jangled by different air currents.) Of Timbaland’s other two contributions, “Skin Divers” is a gloriously seedy slice of bass-and-flourish clublandia; “Zoom In” features Roger Taylor’s best impersonation of a drum machine, and swooping keyboards from Nick Rhodes, recalling his more successfully indulgent ‘80s moments.

The remainder of the album was produced by Timbaland’s affiliate Nate “Danja” Hills, who was born in 1982, the year Rio came out, and is the producer of all the best Timbaland, Timberlake, and Nelly Furtado songs not produced by Timbaland himself. Opener “The Valley” is an Italo-disco pastiche (fair, since much contemporary synth-pop owes a large debt to Duran Duran), complete with placeholder lyrics suggesting a vague, secular spirituality, and a transcendence achieved via the synths reaching their crescendo around Le Bon’s vintage melodramatics on the chorus. The title track is the album’s most blatant lifestyle porn—a perpetual Duran Duran specialty—faster and less lush than “Notorious”, but sporting lyrics decrying, with pleasingly familiar disingenuousness, the hounding of celebrities. Duran Duran always thrived on the “deathstalk paparazzi,” and the decision to title the album after the song probably has less to do with any desire to make a statement than with the phrase’s tantalizing glitz, sex, and violence—but knowing that Duran Duran hasn’t lost their talent for glib hypocrisy is reassuring. It’s how we know they’re still capable of delivering guilt-free guilty pleasure.

Most of the time, anyway. “Box Full o’ Honey” is a daddish moper redeemed slightly by Rhodes’ atmospherics, and obligatory low-end bass from John Taylor; “Tricked Out” is an instrumental that sounds like a rejected video game theme. Moments like these reveal Duran Duran as paunchier than they’d like us to think, with darker circles under their eyes. For the most part, though, Danja lavishes the ever-game band with the Timbaland V.I.P. Lounge treatment: “Tempted”, despite Le Bon’s aging-Casanova voguing, sees Danja polishing a slightly trancier variation on Timbaland’s formula, and the trifecta of “She’s Too Much”, “Dirty Great Monster”, and “Last Man Standing” close out the album with au courant flair.

Listening to Red Carpet Massacre is a bit like catching sight of the oldest guy in the newest club, with blow-dried hair and medallions jangling against an exposed thatch of salt-and-pepper chest hair. Yeah, it’s worth a laugh that he still chases after cool more fervently than people half his age, but who knows more people, has better stories, or better coke? Just don’t go home with him: he’s liable to start crying as he shows you pictures of his kids.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]