The Cure – Albert Hall

The discomfort was palpable in the Cure’s gig at the Albert Hall in London.

“I never thought I’d be playing that song in this particular building,” remarked the Cure’s Robert Smith, midway through the first of four sets at the Albert Hall.

The song was Jimi Hendrix’s Foxy Lady – an unlikely selection, indeed, for the ever-angsty King of Goth. The concept for Smith’s latest live extravaganza was to play his band’s first three albums, from 1979-81, in their entirety, plus “encores from the era”.

It is often assumed that this concert format is a breeze for musicians. Not so: it often forces them to leave the comfort zone of the material they usually play and relearn stuff they might now actually feel ambiguous or embarrassed about.

Smith, for instance, had never wanted Foxy Lady to be included on the Cure’s debut album, Three Imaginary Boys. They’d knocked it out merely as a try-out in the studio, but his meddling record company stuck it on there anyway.

Smith appeared uneasy as they ran through such clunky inaugural repertoire, babbling apprehensively between numbers. Under minimal lighting, with just his present-day bassist and drummer in tow, this was the Cure back to basics, re-incubating the seed of suburban alienation from which the band flowered. The discomfort was palpable.

precisely Smith’s energetic relationship with his back catalogue. As well as serving up mammoth greatest-hits sets, like the one on the imminent Bestival live album, he has himself compiled lavish deluxe editions of all his LPs.

He seemed far more assured, though, leading the charge into the ensuing albums, Seventeen Seconds and Faith. These he had presided over autocratically, hatching an austere, synthy soundworld inspired by his twin idols, David Bowie (circa Low), and Joy Division. Here, against stark lighting and clouds of dry ice, he overwhelmingly filled the Albert Hall’s vast space with his monolithic vision of existential emptiness.

As the line-up expanded

to include two keyboard players (including, intriguingly, Smith’s long-exiled whipping boy, Lol Tolhurst), the slow, crisp beats, circular riffs and frosty washes of synth brooked nothing so trivial as a chorus, even on the singles, A Forest and Primary.

Songs such as The Funeral Party and The Drowning Man were harrowing, impenetrable, yet darkly intoxicating. Between sets, there was piped rainfall.

This was a gig for super-fans, who greeted the encore’s run of B sides as if they were chart-toppers, even when Smith played terrible harmonica (he’s no Mick Jagger).

Light relief finally arrived with Boys Don’t Cry, its tinny guitar line transposed to synth, and, at the last, Let’s Go to Bed, The Walk and The Love Cats, which, in context, Smith trotted out somewhat scornfully.

He promised a next-three-Cure-albums gig in 2012. That’ll be another challenging evening, for sure.

Andrew Perry

 

Rihanna – Talk That Talk

Drearily sexual lyricism over showy but shallow production dominates RiRi’s sixth LP. 

An artist experiencing diminishing returns since 2009’s startling reinvention album Rated R – from victim to victorious in one long-player – Rihanna’s latest can’t stop the rot that set in with the mixed messages of 2010’s Loud. Not that said set was poor – it just failed to match the pop highs of the Umbrella-packing Good Girl Gone Bad and Rated R’s darker tones. The tracks of sixth LP Talk That Talk make a lot of noise but move lethargically – familiar tropes surface in the lyrical content (sexy times being the core focus), and musically it’s a smorgasbord of European dance trends and contemporary RnB production, showy but soulless. Of course there are ballads, too – but after all the saucy front, the slowies feel utterly blunted.

The album begins at a low, the staccato vocal hooks of You Da One irritating rather than engaging. The squelchy, buzzing Where Have You Been is one of two productions from Calvin Harris – indicative of the mainstream dance scene of the UK and Europe making steady progression into the US RnB market. It’s an inoffensive pairing of building beats and sliced-and-diced vocals: to the right feet on the right dancefloor it’ll be manna itself manifested as an arms-in-the-air clubbing highlight. The second Harris hook-up, We Found Love, swells with fevered keys until it explodes, blinding neon like, all over its frenetic, repetitive chorus. It’s by-numbers fare from Harris, given edge by a quite deliberately provocative music video – just the 47 million YouTube views since mid-October.

A forgettable vocal from Jay-Z on the title-track foreshadows an awful exercise in quasi-erotic wordplay on Cockiness (Love It) and a wholly pointless minute-something in the company of star producer The-Dream, wasted on the boring profanities of Birthday Cake. At its halfway mark Talk That Talk takes a turn for the downbeat, the Beyoncé-style paean to perfect monogamy We All Want Love sitting awkwardly beside questionable sexual morals presented by earlier cuts. And Drunk on Love, for the second time in as many weeks release-wise after Rihanna’s guest slot on Drake’s Take Care, matches the Barbadian singer with a Jamie xx (Smith) production, the backing a slightly tweaked take on The xx’s Intro. It feels lazy, an impression that runs the course of this collection, which never convinces the listener that the artist on its cover is fully committed to the cause. On the commercial dubstep rumble of bonus track Red Lipstick, produced by Chase & Status, she sounds as if she phoned in her (again, drearily sexual) vocal five minutes after waking up.

In the recent past Rihanna exhibited a cool nonchalance; here, she’s trapped between playing the characters of a ruthless dominatrix and a docile sort willing to be putty in a boy’s hands. If the real Rihanna doesn’t stand up for her seventh LP, one has to wonder if she’ll ever find herself again.

 

Mike Diver

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/fzq4

Kate Bush – 50 Words for Snow

As anyone who watches QI will tell you, the Inuit language does not actually have 50 words for snow. It’s a myth, but one so pervasive, so pretty, you feel it ought to be true. On the title track of her 10th album, Kate Bush obliges with a flourish. As some sparsely funky electronics percolate behind her, Bush goads QI host Stephen Fry to compile 50 words for the cold white stuff – stuff whose meanings (purity, death, frigidity, fun) can shift and drift, just like the blown flakes themselves. “Icyskidski” is rather fun, but “mountain sob” takes the prize.

There are plenty of other myths abroad on this playful and mysterious record, her second this year after Director’s Cut. There’s at least one ghost, and allegories a-go-go. Anyone hoping that a wild hominid might have escaped western scientists by hiding out in the remotest bits of Nepal will love “Wild Man”, the album’s single and uncontested hit. A nagging loop soundtracks Bush’s rich, scholarly tribute to the Yeti. You suspect she is a little bit in love with the wild man, whose footsteps she erases to keep him safe – but not half as smitten as she is with a snowman.

Had anyone else dared retell the story of Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman as a sexual fantasy which finds “Misty” coming in through the window at night to seduce a willing underage girl, they would have been denounced as abominable by the tabloids. As it’s the grand dame of British art-pop – influence on Florence Welch and countless others – we can discuss the themes of “Misty” – doomed love, virginity’s end, soaking sheets and double entendres such as “I can feel him melting in my hand” – like grown-ups. (Well, almost.) At once absurd and elegant, passionate and glacial, “Misty” stands for the whole album, locating all kinds of love in cold climates.

It’s not always a climate that suits. Like trudging through drifts, 50 Words can be a frustrating listen, where dour piano motifs have the edge over catharsis. It blows hot and cold, with Bush holding back rather than letting rip, a disappointing feature of her latterday albums.

It all begins beguilingly enough with the birth of a snowflake, sung by Bush’s son Albert, who flutters down to a stately piano accompaniment. Their search for each other is echoed later in “Snowed in at Wheeler Street”, an inferior duet between Bush and Elton John. Two lovers are torn apart by various historical forces – the sack of Rome, the second world war, 9/11; the best that can be said for them is that Bush’s voice reaches some of its lushest temperatures.

Then there’s “Lake Tahoe”, which tells of a legend in which a drowned woman seems to rise up out of the lake. “Is your kitchen as you left it?” Bush wonders, making the domestic poignantly romantic as she did on Aerial’s “Mrs Bartolozzi” (“Washing machine/ Washing machine… “). But despite some sylph-like singing from Bush, and arresting atonal passages, “Lake Tahoe” never quite electrifies; guest chorister Stefan Roberts is just too churchy. The final piano track, “Among Angels” should be pulling floods of tears from listeners’ ducts but never quite locates the tap. This album is rather better when it is winking at you, rather than seeking to cryogenically preserve emotion.

Kitty Empire

Lana Del Rey – Scala Concert

Scala, London

The most controversial pop star of the year glides on stage, a dazzling vision in white and gold. Her floaty trousers, not seen since a 60s convention of Stepford wives, sweep the ground so that it looks like the alluring, infuriating Lana Del Rey is walking on air. There are giant white helium balloons all around and covered in projections.

You could argue this New York singer’s feet have barely touched the ground since the cusp of the autumn, when her breakout hit, “Video Games”, went viral. It has now clocked up nearly 6.5 million hits on YouTube. Since then, Del Rey has been embraced as an instant icon, one channelling timeless glamour and haunting vintage pop; one just as vehemently derided as a fraud. That’s a lot of hot air and a lot of other people’s projections.

Then there are the lips. Tonight, Del Rey’s lips seem naturally proportioned, but her previously generous pout has been a major flashpoint in the “realness” debate. Leaving aside the reasons why women in the entertainment industry find it desirable to look as though they have just been punched in the mouth by their pimp, Del Rey’s notional physical enhancement has been synonymous with her notional musical enhancement. Tonight she maintains her mystique, keeping conversation and movement to a minimum; she leaves the stage precisely 37 minutes after she arrives. Amazingly, there is no booing, just the star-struck acceptance that Del Rey is a work in progress.

The eight tracks she plays confirm this. Del Rey has songs every bit as electrifying as “Video Games”, and songs that sound like they were written by committee and given a hasty vintage arrangement. “Radio” could be anyone. By contrast, “Without You” (formerly “China Doll”) is a swooping, piano-tinged torch song that knowingly rhymes “pretty cameras” with “Am I glamorous?” It looks set to be a standout of her forthcoming album, probably called Born to Die, due in mid-January. The title track is another charmer. Although Del Rey takes as her stylistic template a kind of pre-feminist Americana halfway between suburban perfection and the trailer park, equidistant between Mad Men’s uptight Betty and earthy Joan, the song’s desolation is virtually French. “You and I/ We were born to die,” Del Rey intones. Before that, though, there is more of the slumming romance of “Video Games”. “Let’s go get high,” offers Del Rey, “let me fuck you hard in the pouring rain.”

The chief accusation levelled at Del Rey – aka Elizabeth Grant, 25 – is that she is the plaything of major-label manoeuvrers. She was once plain old Lizzie Grant, and Grant’s transformation into Del Rey is the matter of bilious dispute. Did she really live in a trailer park in New Jersey and write her sad, beguiling songs cobbling together her no-budget videos? Or is her oeuvre all fake DIY? On the one hand, it really doesn’t matter. I like Lana Del Rey a lot. All pop benefits from levels of artifice; authenticity is often nothing but a construct, another pose. Audiences will willingly suspend their disbelief, if the artifice is worth it. In his guise as Bob Dylan, Robert Zimmerman is mostly the opposite of a confessional singer-songwriter; he is a grand master of expediency and spin. On the other, it matters a great deal whose idea “Lana Del Rey” was. Pop is a feminist issue, especially since it is stuffed with women who seem to be the playthings of overwhelmingly male creative and label execs. It would be brilliant if Grant created Del Rey off her own bat, but songs such as the identikit R&B-lite “You Can Be the Boss” make you suspect it has been a collaborative effort.

It also matters, because marketing execs and A&Rs have been racking their brains trying to figure out how to move pop on, in the wake of the lucrative retromania unleashed by Amy Winehouse and compounded by Adele. Factor in the enduring appeal of love songs in which the woman is self-sacrificial – a theme in many of Del Rey’s songs – and the ubiquity of early-60s glamour since Mad Men. Tonight, Lana Del Rey arrives onstage in the midst of a perfect pop-cultural storm, as the first episode of new US series Pan Am – a Mad Men tribute starring Christina Ricci – is beginning on BBC2. Her timing, you have to say, is immaculate.

Kitty Empire

Blondie – Eat to the Beat

 

 

BLONDES have more fun. They also sometimes sell more records. This puts our subject in a rather invidious position.

The temptation to sneer at Blondie’s rise from trash pop pariahs to bona fide teenybop idols has not been widely resisted. That’s what you get for making it all look so easy.

The fact that Blondie are merely fulfilling the fantasy they were first rooted in has been widely overlooked. They make good singles, it is grudgingly acknowledged. They make albums that contain good singles; that will be bought by many and remembered mostly for the singles.

This is no exception. Come Christmas, with by then perhaps two more hits to their name, grandparents all over the country will enter record shops and say that name. Blondie are that close to being a genuine pop phenomenon.

I don’t want to belittle their labours by harping on the phenomenon’s foremost aspects, but it’s hard not to. As an album, Eat To The Beat ranks ahead of its immediate predecessors – a varied, rounded, more confident display of the things they do well and the things they insist on doing regardless.

But as a rock band Blondie cut little ice. Catching them live on their first tour supporting Television proved a big mistake. Debbie Harry’s frail presence could hardly even front an army of toy soldiers, never mind a live jiving rock division (should she have one to front). But it’s just this presence that’s been exploited so well in other ways. Her slight voice, too timid for rock, has the perfect coy quality for pop, especially the pop Mike Chapman produces.

That his brand of guileless teeny pop (Mud, Suzi Quatro…lest we forget) is back might have been anticipated. All part of the richly disposable tapestry of the early ’70s that feels uncannily near right now. If The Knack are The Sweet, Gary Numan is David Bowie, Spizz might yet be Marc Bolan, and even Sparks are back in the charts, then what can that make Blondie? Who cares? It’s a silly game anyway. All I know is the cover of Eat To The Beat already looks like a page in Smash Hits. So, let’s forget the thesis and take a stroll around the contents.

They assimilate quickly. The title track, ‘Victor’ and ‘Accidents Never Happen’ follow the band’s infatuation with modish rock, not the most rewarding avenue.

The first four cuts lead straight to the heart of their appeal:

‘Dreaming’, the single, adds the lilt of ‘Sunday Girl’ to the rumble of ‘X Offender’, but what Richard Gottehrer made sound like a roller-rink Chapman adapts for an English church hall youth club disco.

‘The Hardest Part’, redolent of early Bowie/Alomar collaborations, replays their favourite cold war foreign movie theme in stop-frame bursts.

“The hardest part of the armoured guard. The man of steel behind the steering wheel. Need to feel some hardened steel…” she squeals. Bear in mind that Lois Lane is in fact a brunette.

‘Union City Blue’ is another ‘Sunday Girl’ or ‘Presence Dear’ relating to the movie Union City that Debbie stars in, while ‘Shyla’ is pure dream candy; the cotton-wool sound of ‘Going Back’ as once rendered by Dusty Springfield.

The first four cuts on the other side find the Blondies at play: throwaway reggae (‘Die Young Stay Pretty’), some obvious Motown locomotion (‘Slow Motion’), a throwaway lullabye (‘Sound Asleep’), and a commercial fail-safe Euro-disco extension of something you may well have heard somewhere before.

If you’re planning a move to Tibet then by all means buy this album, but if not you’re going to hear the best of it in the circumstances best suited to it anyway.

One more thing. Debbie Harry has a past that belies her glossy image, and that disturbs certain people. But she’s never tried to hide it, and I like her for that.

As (I’m not) ‘Living In The Real World’ (no more), the Britpunk sprint that finishes the album attests, she’s not quite what popular myths have assigned, and Jayne Mansfield sealed, about du…(oops) blondes.

Her tongue is pretty certainly in her cheek.

Paul Rambali

Blondie – Parallel Lines

 

BLONDIE’S third album seems designed to cater for two distinct requirements: a) to satisfy the near-hysterical cries for the pure pop of the band’s debut album; and b) to consolidate their popularity with the hard-rock audience that helped chart the second set, Plastic Letters.

Presumably, that is the significance behind this album’s title. Parallel Lines emerges as an interesting endeavour by Blondie to keep two yelping hounds at bay without sacrificing any artistic integrity and even hinting on one track (‘Fade Away And Radiate’) that their musical future lies far from the commerciality of the first two albums.

Haying subjected the album to intense scrutiny (i.e. I’ve had a tape for a couple of weeks and played it nightly), I’m of the opinion that the compromise between the first and second album is a healthy one and should ideally serve to confirm Blondie’s importance in the present and future.

Mike Chapman (you must know Chinnichap) has been called in to handle the production (Richard Gottehrer directed the first two albums), which is a commendable and ambitious attempt by the band to crystallise their pop attitudes. But I have to say that Blondie are no Sweet, Smokie or Mud and are really not suited to the discipline Chapman obviously wields in the studio.

For starters, I’m not too enamoured of his handling of Deborah Harry’s vocal. He forces a strict delivery that is uncharacteristic of her usual casual, street-corner drawl.

On the other hand, there are choruses on the album (‘Hanging On The Telephone’ and ‘Pretty Baby’ especially) where voices have been tightened to capture that magical Ronettes-like poppiness.

To his credit, though, Chapman has pushed Blondie’s lucrative pop sensibilities to the fore, exaggerating hooks (which perhaps explains why Debbie Harry’s vocal is mixed so high) and making what were very commercial songs even more magnetic.

This works best on ‘Hanging On The Telephone’, the brilliant ‘Pretty Baby’ (a number one smasheroo if I ever heard one), ’11.59′, ‘Sunday Girl’ and ‘I’m Gonna Love You’, all of which are of a pop excelience that qualifies them for singles and would be more appropriate as a 45 than the dull (in comparison) ‘Picture This’.

Another obvious single is the disco-flavoured ‘Heart Of Glass’, which has, naturally, bass and keyboards prominent against Debbie’s beautifully seductive vocal.

Generally, there is a consistency in the band’s writing that, in retrospect, may have been previously missing. With the rock songs, the pushy ‘One Way Or Another’, the nonchalant but deviously potent ‘I Know But I Don’t Know’ (with Infante duetting with Harry on vocals), ‘Will Anything Happen’, a panic-stricken rocker, and ‘Just Go Away’, with Debbie at her bitchiest (“If you talk much louder, you could get an award from the Federal Communications Board”), Blondie further exploit their growing interest in hard, melodic rock.

That leaves one track, ‘Fade Away And Radiate’, the most testing composition Blondie have yet recorded. Not only does it challenge their own capabilities, but the song is a radical departure from what the band’s fans (who get what they want here otherwise) expect. It features Robert Fripp on guitar.

My immediate reaction was to recoil in surprise at the shock shift but I’ve since found that the track has a haunting, hypnotic appeal and, with each subsequent listen, I’ve appreciated it more.

This album will consolidate Blondie’s UK popularity. The next, I suspect, will test their audiences loyalty.

Harry Doherty

The Human League – Hysteria

THIS IS what you’ve got when you haven’t got style: no more masks to hide behind.

So those flat team photograph presentations on TOTP weren’t a bluff: The Human League really are plain janes, boys next door types after all, wallowing in suburbia, worrying about colour schemes, wallflowers at Wigan Casino looking for romance just like in the old songs.

Hysteria is Dare after the thrill has gone, a laboriously worked over successor intended as their ‘enduring’ Dark Side Of The Moon, the one Phil Oakey threatened Paul Morley he would make in NME (January ’83). Even then he was resigned to it turning out as a Dare Mk II. Evidently he has done little to stave off the inevitability.

Given his faith in concrete signs – that is, thirst for big sales – the outcome was predictable. It was bound to translate into suffocating conceptual inflexibility. The need to be recognised as The Human League dictated a computer bias and a bent for True Love bubblespeak. Hysteria is the proven formula as straitjacket. Except this time there is no Martin Rushent to dilate the dreams of a pair of momentarily inspired dilettantes (non-musicians Oakey and slidemaster Adrian Wright, fresh from the split and with plenty to prove) into something aspiring to greatness.

Their dilettantish spark gone, they’re now weighed down by the responsibility of programming computers themselves, burdened by concentration on getting things right. As technicians they’re decidedly pedestrian, capable only of getting computer rhythms to function, never mind making them jump. Plainly they are not Martin Rushent – then, neither is he these days.

With Dare you were never aware of the mechanics of the thing. With Hysteria you become conscious again that Human League were/are a synthesiser group, a step back that cannot be relished by musicians Ian Burden and Jo Callis. The latter is unleashed just once as a guitarist to play a glass splintered cascade of notes on ‘The Lebanon’. That they’re blunted somewhat by knowledge of Keith Levene’s ‘Public Image’ doesn’t stop them inflicting the wounds necessary to part realise Oakey’s pat war reportage.

Otherwise their non keyboard/writing contributions bolster tentative rhythm dollops of, say, the pretty ‘Louise’ or confirm the Chic tendency of ‘I Love You Too Much’ with more physical instrumental touches. But not even they can repair the crippled cover of a Northern soul James Brown favourite ‘Rock Me Again And Again And Again And Again And Again And Again’.

The latter’s inclusion is a convincing argument you can’t go home again. Indeed you should never try. But in light of Oakey’s winter yearnings elsewhere it strikes as not so much a nostalgia as a shying away from the greatnees The Human League were nudging two years ago with their brasher, bolder ‘Love Action’/'Hard Times’ disco 12″.

Here, The Human League seem to be beating a rapid retreat from grand artifice as if, afraid of being called heartless, they want to root themselves in real life. But boys! Girls! You’re artists! Artlessness ought to be your overriding fear. Nobody’s insisting on the group adopting Olympian attitudes, but they ought raise themselves a little, sink in the gutter or at least distance themselves enough to see the crowd clearly if their observations are to be accurately felt.

Simply picking up on teen romance comics and other popular reading matter doesn’t mean The Human League and the crowd speak the same language. On the contrary it has severely curbed their wit and imagination. And listening hard to Oakey’s plain declarations of love, made in his monotonal broody baritone, reveals neither double edged irony nor hidden emotional depth.

With The Human League of Hysteria what you see is what you get. The giant, insipidly coloured Mr Men sleeve lettering must represent their genuine taste, the austerely decorated rooms on the sleeve’s fold out their idea of style, Norman Wisdom pictured on the TV set their sense of comedy. These really are the things their dreams are made of.

And Hysteria is really as dreary as it seems.

Biba Kopf

The Human League – Dare

 

 

 

 

IF THE GUY who built a pinochle-playing computer for his Science Techniques Lab in high school married the gal who wrote poems called “alien/nation” for the Sans-culottes Literary Review, and they had a kid, that kid would probably grow up to lead an electro-synth pop “band.” Most of these crews smack of ink-stained shirt pockets and post-pubescent gloom.

The Human League’s sound is as remote as you’d expect from an outfit that utilizes such hardware as Roland Microcomposers, Linn Drum Computers and Casio VLT, M10s. They’ve got one of those droners singing lead (Philip Oakey, chief writer and one of four synthesizer players; one only plays “occasional” synthesizer, actually, but someone else programs the microcomposer and drum composer), and there are songs on Dare that are real downbeat chuckle-bait (like ‘I Am The Law’, where Qakey takes on the responsibility of squelching society’s criminal impulse, to no avail: on the next song, ‘Seconds’, there’s a murder that you hope against hope wasn’t committed by Chapman).

There’s a built-in neutrality to this all-singing, all-synthing approach. You can’t coax much in the way of emotion out of a Yamaha CS15 as compared to (author’s prejudice) a Rickenbacker. It’s a depersonalized rock method, but Human League’s name turns out to be not all that ironic, and the album title is meant to be taken literally. As in: open yourself to experience. Feel something. Disguised by the whooshes and clicks is often a heart of goo, and sometimes even, a cheery melody. The contradiction between what they’re saying and how they’re saying it is striking. Prick a robot’s skin, and he not only bleeds, he gushes.

Dare, for all its surface coldness, makes an anti-cynicism statement that is close to 60′s rock utopianism (and to its converse, Doors-like bum trippery). Here is a modern album, a microchip extravaganza, that opens with a song called ‘The Things That Dreams Are Made Of’: “Everybody needs love and affection,” sings Oakey (the other Philip, P. Adrian Wright, wrote the song), “everybody needs two or three friends.” He extols the glories of travel, of food, of Ramones, and I don’t think sarcasm is intended. Not when the next tune, ‘Open Your Heart’, could have come from Hair, complete with tribal girlie chorus. And ‘The Sound Of The Crowd’ combines 80′s chic trappings – dance-floor fake bass, persistent (not to say nagging) pulse – with the enduring message of Petula ‘Downtown’/’I Know A Place’ Clark: “Get around town/Where the people look good/ Where the music is loud.”

The flip side of this cellarful of noise has bats in the belfry. The dreary ‘Darkness’ (by Wright) is a perfect theme song for Count Floyd’s Monster Chiller Horror Theater; as one of those damned machines does an impression of a cathedral organ, Oakey is being shadowed by voices, colors, sounds, shapes. “Don’t turn out the lights or I’ll go over the edge.” Ahhoooooo! Scaaaary stuff, boys and girls. Oakey’s ‘Do Or Die’ has something of a Latin hook, and goes on far too long without paint or purpose.

Human League’s team includes females, but they don’t have much to do. Dare is mostly a vehicle for synthesized “riffs” – once a computer latches on to a pattern nothing short of a blowtorch can pry it loose – and the philosophies according to the Philips. (‘This is Phil talking’, ‘Love Action (I Believe In Love)’ goes. “I want to tell you what I’ve found out to be true.”) The women are there for atmosphere.

The one exception is (no coincidence) the best track on the album. ‘Don’t You Want Me’ gets a little intersexual debate going, and not only is it a relief from the standpoint of breaking up the vocal monotony, but the song has a real kick in the chorus and a story with two sides. After a five-year romantic arrangement, she wants out. He thinks she’s an ungrateful wench (says he picked her out of a cocktail bar and made something out of her). She thinks he’s a possessive swine (says she loves him but has to move on and anyway she could have made it alone all along). I believe her, but he gets to sing the chorus, and you can’t help feeling sorry for the fella who’s deluded himself into thinking he’s dispensible. It’s the album’s clearest acknowledgement that in the human league, there are any number of divisions.

Mitchell Cohen