If Goldfrapp?s career is progressing in seasons, the UK duo?s fourth proper, Seventh Tree, is their spring.

But spring is a temperamental and sloppy period, and the club-friendly duo’s newest is, like the season, hard to digest and much messier than their hyper-glossed past releases.

Their first disc, Felt Mountain, recalled fall through its pairing of mournful balladry, lounge rhythms and disconcerting digital manipulation. Black Cherry was the full incarnation of winter chill ? synth-heavy tracks balancing throbbing bass with hollow percussion ? and was reminiscent of light reflecting on the snow and the playful cries of children echoing in the cold air.

And Supernature would certainly have been the band’s summer. It was a little over the top, sacrificing Goldfrapp’s inclinations of artiness for an elitist title in the club world and product placement everywhere else. The album favored a warm tone throughout but digressed into bombastic sonics during its more overt singles like ?Lovely 2 C U,? akin to the manner summer’s heat crescendos to unbearable levels.

But Seventh Tree is Goldfrapp’s rainy, unexpected and not necessarily enjoyed season of rebirth. Perhaps it was the television commercials that got to them, or maybe the discotheque rhythms lost their appeal. The most likely reason for such a shockingly abrupt stylistic change is the same reason the seasons repeat every year ? cyclical creativity. Felt Mountain was similarly slow, lyrical, symphonic and pensive, but it aimed to induce a bizarre feeling of alienation, the kind of shift-in-your-seat quality the most jarring Portishead song used to embody.

And spring is always a time of change, building off the weather patterns, precipitation and terrestrial activity of the seasons before it. In this manner, Seventh Tree employs the more unplugged flavor of their early work, but instead is a collection of almost lo-fi tunes that smell of melting snow, green grass and the year’s first petals. Even birds chirp triumphantly during the string-carried breakdown of album-opener ?Clowns.?

But whether or not ’60s-flavored ?Happiness? recalls the opening of those colorful perennial blossoms, or the violin flourishes of ?Cologne Cerrone Houdini? sound like the patter of April’s bursts of rain, Seventh Tree is an album that fails to excite throughout. ?Eat Yourself? and ?Caravan Girl? are such shining beams in the midst of the tremulous weather of the rest of the album that they serve to dampen the album’s solid closer. And ?Little Bird? is far too atonal to mesmerize in the manner it was surely intended.

It seems Goldfrapp has yet to find the perfect balance between body-shaking grooves and art-house compositions that their newest work so longingly pursues. But the well-known fact of spring is that the chaotic season often tells little about the way the summer that follows will be. If Seventh Tree is indeed the band?s album of rebirth, it could mean a more successful incarnation of what this album now attempts in the future. But, for now, their newest should serve as a way to forget the frosty air outside the window and as a reminder of the warm rays that are beginning to melt the icicles outside and warm rosy cheeks.