McCluskey’s fey voice remains an acquired taste but he’s on fine lyrical form for numbers such as “Final Song” and the cyber-flâneur observations of “Night Café”, always accompanied by crisp, delicious analogue melodies. There is even an android love song, “Kissing the Machine”, co-written with Karl Bartos, once of Kraftwerk, back in the early Nineties and effectively resurrected.Įlsewhere they return to the mood and spirit of their classic “Maid of Orleans” for “Helen of Troy”, while the bass-pumping “Dresden” analogises the German city’s Second World War doom to a collapsing love affair. As well as proper songs there are delicious sonic science fiction interludes, Bladerunner-ish snippets that pronounce “The future that you anticipated has been cancelled” or the glistening self-explanatory outburst “The Future Will Be Silent”. It emanates a melancholy that the sci-fi world OMD imagined in the late-Seventies turned out to be something less romantic - no hover cars and Metropolis robots, just Facebook and gawking dead-eyed at endless videos of cats. The atmosphere throughout is one of wistful retro-futurism. Their new one, however, returns to their pristine synth-pop roots and is a corker. The album that followed, History of Modern, tipped its hat to all OMD’s musical incarnations and was a mixed bag, if occasionally pleasing. The classic quartet line-up, featuring Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphries, the creative core from 1978 until the end of the Eighties, reformed in 2005.
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