Passionoia is the third and final studio album by British rock band Black Box Recorder, released on 3 March 2003 through One Little Indian. Following the promotional cycles for the band's The Facts of Life (2000) and musician Luke Haines' The Oliver Twist Manifesto (2001), they started working on their next album. The band and Pete Hofmann produced the recording sessions; in the midst of this, their label Nude Records went bankrupt. Passionoia is a dance-pop album that was compared to the works of Pet Shop Boys and Saint Etienne, building on the lyrical theme of Britishness that they first explored on their debut album England Made Me (1998).
Passionoia received favourable reviews from critics, with the majority of them praising the music. Positive comments were also made on the songs' lyricism, while others commented on vocalist Sarah Nixey's voice. It reached number 179 on the UK Albums Chart, while "These Are the Songs" and "The School Song" peaked at number 91 and 102, respectively, on the UK Singles Chart. The former was released as the album's lead single in February 2003, followed by "The School Song" as the second single from the album in June 2003.
Background
Black Box Recorder released their second studio album The Facts of Life in May 2000 through Nude Records, peaking at number 37 on the UK Albums Chart. Its two singles, "The Facts of Life" and "The Art of Driving", reached number 20 and 53 on the UK Singles Chart, respectively. Before the album was released, musician Luke Haines criticized the label's "artless and crass" promotional campaign for it. Reviewers felt that it might have been more popular if Haines refrained from calling the label "fucking cunts" during an interview. The band went on a four-date tour of the UK, and would appear at the Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds Festivals later in the year. By this stage, with two solo releases in the pipeline, Haines considered retiring from the music industry, before switching focus to the next Black Box Recorder album. Him and bandmate John Moore set about to create an electronic album "with Hank Marvin guitars", though this latter aspect was soon dropped when Haines acquired a piece of equipment that he dubbed the "DJ machine".
In July 2001, around the promotion for his solo album The Oliver Twist Manifesto (2001), Haines planned a week-long boycott against BBC Radio 1, dubbed "Pop Strike". After this concluded, Black Box Recorder started working on their next album, with recording happening sporadically across 2000 and 2001 at a studio in Shoreditch, London. Passionoia was produced by the band members and Pete Hofmann, who also performed engineer and mixing roles. Tim Weller contributed drums to "British Racing Garden", "I Ran All the Way Home" and "Girls Guide for the Modern Diva". During this time, Nude Records would eventually go bankrupt, filing for liquidation by the end of 2001.
Composition and lyrics
Overview
AllMusic reviewer Andy Kellman said there was "increasingly ornate arrangements" as the band shift their sound to dance-pop, which recalled the work of Pet Shop Boys and Saint Etienne. In a review for Blender, journalist Andrew Harrison wrote that for the band, pop music entails "honeyed synthesizer melodies acting as a Trojan horse" for the lyrics. The Guardian critic Alexis Petridis wrote that the chord progressions were inspired by French chanson music, aided by softly "plucked acoustic guitars, [and] hazy electronics". Idov remarked that the "funniest thing" about the band was that despite "embodying all things British, they end up sounding French", adding that the "blippier numbers seem informed by Air," and chord sequences lifted from the disco-era of Serge Gainsbourg. Harrison thought Nixey "articulates the songs in the persona of a deliciously bored, spoiled and corrupt posh girl", while Maya Singer of Cleveland Scene thought she came across as a "particularly bloodless" iteration of Sarah Cracknell, frontwoman for Saint Etienne.