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The duo Goldfrapp, huge in their native Britain, have confounded fans of their staple glam-disco sound with the "psychedelic folk" of their new album. But they've always had a strong leaning towards the bucolic…

ALISON GOLDFRAPP AND Will Gregory must have felt they'd exhausted the disco-ball glamorama of Black Cherry (2003) and Supernature (2005). In today's pop climate it seems an almost logical move to go "back to nature" in search of new inspiration.

"Our heads were bursting with Supernature after the [last] tour," Gregory has said. "And we thought, wouldn't it be lovely just to have a nice empty space? Not all this revved-up musical intensity. And when you think of an empty space you sometimes think of someone just strumming a guitar, gathered around a campfire."

Not that there hasn't been a healthy streak of pastoralism in all Goldfrapp's work since their glorious 2001 debut Felt Mountain; even Black Cherry boasted "Hairy Trees" and "Deep Honey." But anyone expecting more of the Marc-Bolan-meets-Giorgio-Moroder strut of the ultimately underwhelming Supernature are advised to beat a swift retreat from Goldfrapp's new musical glade.

Those who choose to stick around and search for the "seventh tree" in the dream that inspired this album's title are in for a delicious treat. Part-inspired by an unlikely unplugged session the duo did for BBC Radio 1's Jo Whiley in 2006, Goldfrapp and Gregory have made an album as hummably lovely as it is knowingly referencing of a certain tradition of neo-psychedelic English whimsy. Goldfrapp may be a performance artist on an almost Cindy Sherman level, but she and Gregory seem able to knock off pop melodies (eg first single "A&E") that suggest they have a future as songsmiths for Spice Girls Aloud gal groups if she ever tires of prancing about in horse-tails. "[I] listen to the radio," she sings on "The Road to Somewhere," "like a friend that guides me…"

Most of Seventh Tree's songs are built around delicate acoustic guitar picking, with a dreamy screen of strings, antique electronic keyboards (such as the Optigon), and seraphic triple-tracked vocal harmonies that swell against Goldfrapp's gently sex-kittenish purr. The opening "Clowns" suggests the pair are at least cogniscent of cult acid-folk maiden Linda Perhacs' 1970 album Parallelograms (especially the lovely "Chimacum Rain"), while the fluting vocal arpeggios and ambient guitar spray of "Little Bird" recall the Cocteau Twins and even the summer-dappled Kate Bush of The Sensual World. The mellotron singalong of "Happiness" is "Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane" Beatles via XTC, a benign dismissal of the Affluenza plaguing western civilization.

If there are no saucy boys with "Swarfega fingers" on Seventh Tree, the eponymous heroine of the driving, ecstatic "Caravan Girl"--which should come earlier in the album--is a rural free spirit with whom Alison wishes to flee her humdrum life. The lush romanticism of "A&E" is played out on a pastel hospital ward--a typically Frappian confluence of ardour and damage, sung to a meltingly pretty tune that even Kylie could cover. "Cologne Cerrone Houdini" is a return to the Felt Mountain 'frapp template--Serge Gainsbourg with strings by John Barry--with a plectrum-played bass guitar that's more than a little redolent of Beck's Serge-drenched Sea Change. The closing "Monster Love" whisks us away from the West Country--all the way to Los Angeles, where Alison tries to free herself of a consuming Tinseltown passion.

Like Beck, Bjork, Peej Harv and too few others, Goldfrapp are to be applauded for following their peculiar muse whilst sidestepping the pitfalls of CelebWorld. Unlike the imploding Winehouses out there, Alison never conflates her personae with her personal life. "We weren't creating a person," she wisely noted of her Supernature alter ego. "We were dramatising the music." Amen to that.

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