Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Human League, The
Label: Wall of Sound
Release: 2011
Runtime: 46:55
Rating: 2.2/5
Ten years after The Human League’s last release, Secrets, the icons of eighties new wave synth pop are heading back to the stage. Just like their Sheffield cousins OMD and Heaven 17 are showing fresh signs of life, Oakey and company decided it was high time for a general wake-up call and a new The Human League document.
The new album, as its banal cover art already suggests, comes across as very simple, bizarrely minimalist. Expected. Or is it? For fans of the old The Human League catalog it’s exactly what the doctor ordered, but let’s be honest: in a rich career from a band Bowie once called “the sound of the future,” this is a perfect paraphrase of a thawed-out “Being Boiled” recipe. In other words, treading water and eroding the credibility The Human League have had to fight tooth and nail to hold on to, with the unstoppable trend of turning into a club band over the last two decades, where it’s frankly surprising the group is still functioning at all.
The album feels like it was taken out of the freezer after twenty-five years. The focus is on the signature, representative combination of three voices, Philip Oakey, Susan Sulley and Joanne Catherall, sworn to the service of dance-y “jagged” rhythms, all of it wrapped in a blanket of old-school sounding synths and sonic manipulation of them. With that accent of bizarre minimalism that made new wave catch fire so effectively when it first appeared, and that ruled the top of the charts in the eighties.
The devil of it is that Oakey has long trusted trendy production, which isn’t necessarily a smart choice for The Human League. This time he handed the sound treatment to the obscure psychedelic trip hop duo I Monster, who stripped the organic, natural sonic cover off the three vocalists and completely “estranged” them, synthetically, in the final mix. The quality, fully credible vocal delivery of the Oakey-Sulley-Catherall trio, which I verified on 12.11.2011 at The Human League’s gig in Zagreb, definitely doesn’t deserve that. But good-natured fiction leads the mind toward all sorts of experiments that later turn out not to work in reality at all. The vocals should have been left untouched in the production, since they lack the proven charisma of luring you into voluptuous sin, something The Human League used to pull off with ease.
There’s only one song here that actually sparks any interest. That’s the opener, Never Let You Go, with an extremely flirty arrangement of verse, pre-chorus and chorus, a sweetly seductive melody in the chorus hook, properly built-up atmosphere, and all three vocals optimally placed in the delivery. The same certainly goes for the old-fashioned electronic curtain of synths, deftly worked into the song’s framework.
After that the album starts sinking second by second in an attempt to sell a formula that’s already been sold a million times (sold back when it actually ignited something). The repetitive delivery of one-syllable lines, mostly nocturnal grotesquerie from Night People, Sky, Into The Night,… stirs up nothing interesting, nothing unheard, nothing freshly defiant.
For the longevity of a band like The Human League, you’d expect more daring and artistry, with a solid and credible platform of musical experimentation pushing the group forward. Toward successfully defying the new times. What I mean above all is that the band keeps skillfully avoiding any spices that could enrich its expression in the new era in a seriously exciting way. The chronic absence of guitar bugs me, and so does the wasted void in the contrast between vocals and rhythmic bed, which they can’t plug even with a supplementary bass guitar melody, let alone upgrade with the juiciness of sampled sound loops with greater “organic fire.” This is really an album completely lost in time and space, one that has lost touch with the present and with any point, and The Human League, like a completely gray-haired dinosaur, have lost all ability to adapt to the new times, and with it a great deal of credibility.
Line-up
Philip Oakey – vocals
Susan Sulley – vocals
Joanne Catherall – vocals
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Rob Barton – electronic drums
Nic Burke – guitar, bass guitar, keyboards
Neil Sutton – keyboards
Production
Dean Honer & Jarrod Gosling
Track list
1. Never Let Me Go
2. Night People
3. Sky
4. Into the Night
5. Egomaniac
6. Single Minded
7. Electric Shock
8. Get Together
9. Privilege
10. Breaking the Chains
11. When the Stars Start to Shine
