Even before they floored a South By Southwest crowd in Austin with their only American performance to date, Placebo was positioned as London's next big export. They've got poise, deftly constructed songs, and a mysterious frontman--just what it seems to take these days to get a stateside visa.

But luckily, Placebo seems more than content to let the Blurs and Oasis' fight it out, setting their sights instead on the ghosts of David Bowie, the Stooges, the Cure, U2 and Nirvana--each at their most relevant career points. It's an ambitious plot for a debut, which every so often makes Placebo feel like the textbook "next-big-thing," too compelling to write off, but too oddly incomplete to champion. As a lyricist and frontman, though, Brian Molko stakes some serious rock star claim well worth getting excited about.

Molko is a shameless roleplayer, and on the band's demos that made the rounds last year, his voice was ambiguous, too. On Placebo, producer Brad Wood (Liz Phair, Veruca Salt) saves the squeal that so slyly alludes to Molko's bi image, but somehow bulks it up much deeper into manhood.

This full-length is really built around a three-song centerpiece. Three tunes rarely make for an album, but these come awfully close. On "I Know," a slinky power ballad, the young American refugee dutifully explains, "I know you love this song/and not the singer/I know you've got me wrapped around your finger/I know you want the sin/without the sinner." Had he not just one track earlier offered a graphic ode to what we're led to believe is his own bisexual promiscuity ("Nancy Boy"), the humility might be believable. Then on "Bruise Pristine," the final track of the triad, it's obvious that Molko's an equally tricky guitarist--slyly adding a Thurston Moore aesthetic to a brutally focused backbone of Metallica chug.

While the rest of Placebo sometimes seems like an excuse to drive the same riff or line into the ground, the repetition does come off as hypnotic. Though the hidden "Chariots of Fire"-like bonus piano track is predictably self-indulgent, the quick buzzes of "36 Degrees," "Come Home," and "Teenage Angst" are far more considerable fare. Keeping character with his Brit compatriots, it's almost as if Molko is already too big of a star in his own mind to indulge us with anything more substantial.

In an alternative landscape where the Deep Blue filters get by with one good song, Placebo more than passes with three of em.' They back them up with a whole lot of attitude and one bona fide rock star.