If you have an opinion on Placebo, it’s probably a strong one. The multinational, UK-based rockers have been dividing opinion for over a decade now, mainly through Brian Molko’s (cough) unique vocal style and his angst-filled, hedonistic lyrics.

In a way, Placebo’s high-glam, emotive style presaged a lot of the teen-baiting emo-influenced modern rock of today. The younger sibling of the late 90s Placebo fan is today’s My Chemical Romance and, well, Placebo fan. There’s a fantastic drama and accessibility to this kind of music for the poorly-adjusted teenager. But obviously it can really grate on people who fancy themselves a bit above it all.

Strangely enough, despite my own teenage love for the exaggerated histrionics of Placebo, my favorite songs were the expansive instrumental hidden tracks from their first two albums (their third, Black Market Blood, also had a hidden track, but it was more a standard b-side). While the immediacy of a song like “Every You, Every Me” was its strength, “Hong Kong Farewell” and “Evil Dildo” are interesting in less obvious ways.

For one thing, they’re subtle. And if there is only one thing Placebo aren’t, it’s subtle. Maybe it’s the absence of vocals and lyrics. After all, a rhyming couplet about “spunk and bestiality” might be just your thing, but it’s a single entendre at best. Take away Molko’s confrontational verbiage and you’re left with the complex instrumental interplay of their best moments without the diversions.

“Hong Kong Farewell,” from the self-titled first album, is driven along by a chiming single-chord strum overlaid with pretty reverbed piano and brushed drums. The effect sits somewhere near the post-rock of Silver Ray or Mogwai’s mellower moments—not obvious touchstones for a band that thrives on the punchy and the obvious.

Similar in its use of instrumentation and evolution by degrees but considerably more ferocious, “Evil Dildo” materializes out of a discordant Sonic Youth-style guitar line into a clamor of drums and guitar slashes. The pornographic, abusive answering machine message playing in the background mines similar territory to your standard Placebo song with its references to cannibalistic castration, but it’s so low in the mix, it doesn’t detract.

As time goes by, a lot of Placebo fans get fed up with the lack of musical progression and move on to more complex soil. I’m definitely in that camp, but tracks such as these are serving me well after many years and deserve some recognition.

If you’re someone who can’t sit through forty minutes of Placebo, let alone minutes of silence on the way to even more Placebo, then here’s some of what you’ve been missing.

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