Album Shuffle 010: Esther Phillips, FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM

Kudu · 1971

The sly, slinky funk reaches out, curls around your body, and then it has you by the throat and you can't get away no matter how you tussle. And the voice speaks — or no, it chants — with such deep intensity that it stills your muscles but sets your brain afire. "A junkie walking through the twilight..."

It's a Gil Scott-Heron song, it's called "Home Is Where The Hatred Is," and when it lost to Aretha Franklin's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" (srsly?) at the 1972 Grammies, the Queen of Soul, never noted for her unwillingness to receive acclaim, said it belonged instead to the woman who once went by Little Esther, two decades and many pop lifetimes ago. Little no more, Esther has grown into her cracked moan of a voice, and sings with an authority she's all too heartbreakingly earned. The slithery twilit funk that backs her strikes a balance between the cinematic strut of Isaac Hayes and the late-night woe of B. B. King; soul-jazz, jazz-blues, and fusion legends sit behind her and noodle seductively away as Esther pours all seduction from her.

Her words are not her own — not only avant-beat poet GSH, but Big Easy funkmaster Allen Toussaint, Marvin em effing Gaye, etc. have scripted these beautiful, anguished poses for her to strike — but her performative power makes them live, and she very nearly approaches the plateau where the most singular vocal genius of the age, Nina Simone, sits lonely and narrow-eyed surveying the world with a warm despair in her throat.

It's too easy to call it a soul record: it's as much jazz, or blues, or funk — and it's none of these things entirely, it finds its own shadowy path through them, hugging the interstices, lost in the stars. Esther Phillips demands rediscovery.

Album Shuffle 009: Mariah Carey, THE EMANCIPATION OF MIMI

Island · 2005

Well, I had five paragraphs ready to go, mostly griping about the length of the album and how few reference points I have for modern R&B, but then I decided to listen again on the way home and most of my complaints melted away. This is a great album. Sure it could stand to trim some fat, but even the dully, gloopy ballads have these amazing little runs where she uses the birdlike high end of her register.

But in the interest of full disclosure and laziness, here's what I had written. Meet you at the end for a wrap-up.

The reason I have this album on my iPod is that it was on Entertainment Weekly's list of the Best Hundred Albums of the last 25 years which they put out a few years ago now, and I downloaded it for my now-defunct blog project of listening to all those albums and passing summary judgment. I never got around to it, but it's held on tenaciously, refusing to be disappear into the ether even when I've had catastrophic data loss on various music hard drives over the years.

So it came up on shuffle the other day, and I nodded my head like yeah. I've become a much bigger fan of Mariah Carey than I was two years ago — she's one of the few artists to make an appearance on both my 90s list and my 2000s list, and I have no regrets — but for all that I've never listened to a full album of hers, turned off by both the marathon running times and the likelihood of gloopy ballad after gloopy ballad: after all, it was the one-two-three punch of "Hero," "Without You," and "One Sweet Day" that made me not-a-fan in the first place, way back in the dim recesses of 1995.

Well, I can't do anything about the running time; although the standard pop practice for the past half-decade has been to trim the fat from albums and pump them out more regularly (Britney with back-to-back records in the space of a year is something of a modern miracle), nobody apparently informed Mariah, and this thing is seventeen tracks long not counting the remix of "We Belong Together" (which I don't), which might be a fine double album but is completely indigestible in one sitting. For me, anyway, and I'm clearly not the ideal pop album consumer; I listen mostly during commutes, and after about six songs by the same person I'm bored and want to start listening to somthing else.

So I can only report on the highlights of this set, as I didn't exactly tune out the boring bits but I only really noticed it when it interested me. The album as a whole was apparently something of a comeback for our girl, though as I wasn't paying much attention between 1995 and 2005 you couldn't have proved it by me, after the famous, fabulous bomb of Glitter. I guess the narrative was something like "Hey world Mariah's back and not even one of the most well-publicized breakdowns in modern pop history following one of the most well-publicized failures in modern pop history can keep her down," but as I say I wasn't paying attention, so all that matters to me is how it holds up five years on.

Well, "We Belong Together" was of course the big hit single, and deservedly so, following in the great tradition of rhythmic Mariah ballads ("Emotions," "Fantasy," "Always Be My Baby") with just a touch of a facelift for the '00s. The Neptunes are all over this thing, and while I'm still a little shaky on what made them so great (like I say I wasn't paying attention, and I'm more of a Timbaland guy anyway), I can certainly appreciate the modernization of Mariah's sound, with stronger, more fluid beats and a choppier, hip-hop-derived rhythmic style. She meets the format brilliantly; she's no Aaliyah or Beyoncé, able to ride a chopped-and-screwed beat with fierce aplomb, but she doesn't need to be: she just floats sweetly above it all like she's always done, and unveils a sexy "head" voice (as opposed to her traditional belting-from-the-diaphragm delivery), where she harmonizes with herself on the stuttering verse lines before the choruses splash out in the kind of overwrought brio that only she can really get away with. (Think of all those poor dumb American Idol kids trying to squeeze their throats together at the beginnings and ends of lines in order to emulate Mariah's sobbing delivery; they always sound stupid and affected, whereas she just sounds whatever emotion she's trying to convey, turned up to eleven.)

Okay, first, the Neptunes had nothing to do with "We Belong Togther," that was all Jermaine Dupri; in fact the Neptunes had a hand in exactly one track: "Say Somethin'," with Snoop Dogg. I hate getting these things wrong. Dupri's not exactly a slouch in the writing/production department, though (I think I've been aurally confusing him with Pharrell for a while now), and the front half of the record is loaded with his jams. The back half bogs down some, but it picks up amazingly with the great gospel song "Fly Like A Bird" and "Don't Forget About Us" — funny how all the songs that jumped out at me were pulled for singles. Almost like they know what they're doing.

What I said about her adaptiveness to postmillennial R&B still stands: she's an object lesson in how a modern pop star can remain relevant past 30.

Album Shuffle 008: Cabaret Voltaire, THE CRACKDOWN

Some Bizarre · 1983

Well. There's a reason I only knew Cabaret Voltaire's singles.

I'm not going to say this album is bad; I'd need to spend more time with it to do that, and I don't really have the patience for that. I'd rather just listen to the songs that struck me on a loop and see what I get out of them:

"Just Fascination" is my second-favorite CV song (after "Sensoria," natch), and its gloomy, twitchy disco sounds great here as the most alive thing on an album of smeared, stuttering synths and cryptic intonations.

"Animation" features Stephen Mallinder affecting a German accent among the most dancefloor-friendly productions on the album.

"Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself)" sounds almost exactly like the Human League before the girls came on, only with a funkier bass.

"Haiti" is a lovely, moody soundscape that I have to imagine has been posted all over the Internet (just not the corners I frequent) over the past several weeks, quite possibly the best thing on the record.

"Diskono" is a pretty good Kraftwerk tribute.

And the rest of the album almost put me to sleep on the freeway before I fished my dinner out of my bag and drank Coke to stay alive. (Repetitive music + not enough sleep + afternoon sun + stop & go traffic = danger, kids.) I hated the last couple of songs on the album, but whether that was because I was in a mood to hate anything or because they were truly unpleasant I haven't had the moral courage to decide by revisiting them.

On the whole, I believe I'll stick with the singles (and "Haiti"). 1983 was too long ago, Cabaret Voltaire's self-importance too impregnable, for me to return often to these slabs of their work for pleasure. In the middle of a mix (especially the kinds of mixes I tend to make) they're fantastically broody, a gothic interlude between splashes of Fun: but run all together like this . . . I know, my real problem is with the album as a format. You don't have to tell me twice.

Album Shuffle 007: The Meters, THE METERS

Josie · 1969

Once upon a time there was a band called Booker T. & The MG's. Then the Meters happened, and Donald Duck Dunn is left swallowing dust. Zigaboo!

Funk before funk, crisp soul exponential. New Orleans was always the mother home to everything good and beautiful and sizzling in American music. Every song sounds the same*. That's the point. Only problem with the record is the spaces in between the songs.

There's really nothing to say about this record, not with words. Hips, feet, shoulders, and every muscle in the body might have a shot, though.

*Not in the back half. "Ann" is going on a mixtape dedicated to the next person I fall in love with.

Album Shuffle 006: Curve, DOPPELGÄNGER

Anxious · 1992

About halfway through the album I found myself asking myself grumpily why I had it in the first place; surely I couldn't have thought that anything this monochrome and repetitive would be a priority in my listening life someday. Glancing through the factoids a single search gleans, I realized why: because this is the band that people always say Garbage ripped off.

I don't like Garbage either.

That's not exactly true. I haven't listened enough to Garbage to know whether I like them; and if I was able to just choose one Curve song and soak in it for a while I bet I'd like them just swell, but over the course of an album (even if it is a mercifully brief 11-song one; 90s British indie got one thing right anyway) they shift and moan and jackhammer and flare in a very narrow groove and after I've said that they sound like My Bloody Valentine except instead of Kevin Shields it's Trent Reznor and instead if Bilinda Butcher it's late-period Madonna (without the memorable lyrics any such substitutions would imply), there's not a lot left to say.

It's quite true that I haven't listened to much shoegaze outside of one narrow groove (Loveless and, er, that's it), that I haven't listened at all to the electronic-industrial it was apparently Curve's stroke of genius to apply to shoegaze (one disgusted run through The Downward Spiral aside), and that there's really nothing aside from some of Toni Halliday's vocal tics and the distant memory of old Shep Pettibone beats to remind me of Madonna. So there's a lot of untested assumptions running through my approach to the album. But nevertheless I was getting ready to write it off as another bad bet, composing at least some of the above in my head as I pulled into the garage . . . .

And then I unjacked my iPod from the car stereo and put in headphones instead and !

Doppelgänger sounds a lot better on headphones. This is about all I'm willing to say in its favor so far, though you may if you wish color me intrigued. It still sounds overly bright and busy, those blocky jackhammer presets getting in the way of hearing anything else, but at least I can tell that Halliday's singing lyrics now. (Even if I keep wanting her to sing "Vogue" over top of it.) Another quick search, and it seems that "Faît Accompli" was the big single. Well, I'll see what I can get out of it. No promises, though.

And then I might check out this Garbage I've heard so much about too . . . .

Album Shuffle 005: Fela Ransome Kuti & The Afrika 70, GENTLEMAN

EMI · 1973

I'm afraid there's going to be a lot of "OH OF COURSE NOW I FINALLY GET IT" in the course of this blog; especially since I'm limiting my music talk to stuff I haven't heard/paid attention to previously, I'm mostly going to be featuring stuff I haven't previously gotten, and my self-image as a perceptive, sensitive, and thoughtful music-absorber requires me to at least go through the motions of understanding what I hear.

Which would frankly be a better introductory paragraph to saying thumbs down Fela Kuti you suck, but I'm neither that iconoclastic nor that stupid. Oh of course now I finally get it. Partially, at least.

I'd been avoiding Fela Kuti's music for a while, telling myself that it was on the principle of ignoring the elephant in the room while I rooted around for the lesser-known treasures. (Similarly, I've heard less Bob Marley than U-Roy, Lee Perry, or Burning Spear.) But really it was because when I first tried to get into him I couldn't focus; the music just slid past my brain, funky and sweet and hard-charging but going on for too long for me to take it in; after about four minutes my attention would wander and it could have been anything playing. What was the good of that? So I left Fela alone, resenting him slightly for not being more pop.

But today, it was precisely the length and structure that grabbed me. For reasons which I won't bother to go into here, I've spent a lot of time listening to very long songs; in fact for a while I was listening to nothing but songs which took up an entire side of a vinyl record. So I've become used to a certain ebb-and-flow in my long, "unstructured" jams. Start slow, build, crescendo, break, return, build, crescendo, fade. You know how it works as well as I.

But Fela jarred me out of my assumptions by kicking off "Gentleman" with a handful of bars of wicked funk, then cutting the band out entirely while he improvises, hard, for nearly four minutes all alone on the sax. Then, just after I'd given up hope and was settling in for a session of Anthony Braxton without the skronk, Tony Allen drops a beat; and the full-band funk that blows in behind him is all the sweeter and sweatier for having held off for so long. It's still eight minutes before a vocal line comes in (apart from the shouts Fela gave himself as encouragement during the solo), and the lyric — I no be gentleman at all, I be Africa man original — plays havoc with colonial assumptions and the aesthetics of civilization.

(Which you could say the same thing about James Brown and George Clinton but you'd sound like a dick, so why insist on interpreting Fela Kuti through the cultural-studies fog? Knee-jerk response to "non-Western" culture? (Non-Western in quotes obviously because of Fela's deep indebtedness to Westerners like James Brown, Pharoah Sanders, etc.) (But this week of stupid Vampire Weekend arguments has left me gun-shy about deploying the discourse of race and privilege.))

The two songs which make up the second side, "Fefe Na Efe" and "Igbe," are more classically structured as jams; the former, in its deconstruction of an Ashanti proverb about women holding their breasts when they run, is groovier and closer to the American funk I know; the latter rocks harder and left me feeling exhausted but in a good way, exhilarated.

I have, like any good music nerd, a lot more Fela Kuti, and I'm feeling much less intimidated about diving into it now. I'm looking forward to placing this in the context of a career. It sounds like a major highlight, but is it? Stay tuned.

Album Shuffle 004: Claude François, COMME D'HABITUDE

Philips · 1967

I might as well say before this goes any further that I have a lot of old French and Brazilian and Italian pop records and I know that in the 60s it was fashionable for every non-Anglophone pop album to merely bear the name of its singer on the spine, but I'm going to be following the long-established convention of calling these records by the title of their first track. Led Zeppelin can get away with that cutesy self-titled shit; Claude François cannot.

Which: Claude who? This is the first record I've come to in these shuffles that hasn't appeared on any List Of The Greatest Albums According To Whomever that I've seen, and while Claude François isn't nobody, he's not one of the four or five 60s French pop stars that young relatively hip twenty-first century Anglophones know. (That is, he's not Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, France Gall, Brigitte Bardot, or Anna Karina, and people only know the latter two for their movies.) The dawning light of comprehension may appear in your eyes (as it did in mine) when informed that "Comme d'habitude" is the original song off of which Paul Anka based "My Way." You know, the Sinatra thing.

I've always hated "My Way," and hearing François' original gives me a clue to why: it's a chanson, not a Tin Pan Alley song, which means it has a different structure from the kind of songs that Sinatra was the Best Ever Singer of. Tin Pan Alley songs — the good ones, the kind that get into history books and retrospectives and Sinatra albums — are structured like jazz compositions, with introductions and heads and bridges and space for instrumental breaks. French chanson, on the other hand, is structurally closer to folk song, with tight circular melodies and repetitive verses; emotional shifts in chanson are tied to emphasis and rhythm, not harmonics. Sinatra is a singer who relies on harmonic shifts to guide his subtle narrative power; given a repetitive blow-after-blow-after-blow song like "My Way," all he can do is up the arrangement and pour on the juice, and it's a smug, self-satisfied asshole of a lyric to begin with; by the last verse, he sounds exactly like the two-bit tin-pot hood-made-good he once was and now is only, the Voice that had once crooned so eloquently of heartbreak and wisdom lost forever in an alcoholic roar.

Compare this to "Comme d'habitude." François gives it a rock arrangement, which is exactly right: not only does rock share the affinity to folk song (this wouldn't sound out of place on Blonde On Blonde), but rock instrumentation, especially those galloping drums, can add intensity to the later verses without the brassy bombast of Don Costa's gloating orchestration. I don't have much French, so I can't speak to how much better or worse the original lyrics are than Anka's whole-cloth substitute, but knowing that "comme d'habitude" means "as usual" hints at a somewhat less egocentric epic.

But that's just the first track, and still my least favorite thing on the record. It's also one of only a handful of original songs (well, "original" as in written for him by lyricist Gilles Thibaut with various French pop composers) on the album; six of the rest are reimaginings of current American and British pop songs, and the closer "Ce soir je vais boire" is adapted from the Italian dance song "Stasera mi butto" by Rocky Roberts.

Those American and English songs, though, are interesting in their own right, if only in the way that putting them all next to each other tells us something interesting about what François wanted to signal. They are, in the order heard: the Foundations' "Baby, Now That I've Found You" ("Pourquoi"), the Move's "Flowers In The Rain" ("Le Martien"), the Bee Gees' "Massachussetts" ("La plus belle chose du monde"), the Hollies' "Carrie Ann" ("L'homme au traineu"), Stevie Wonder's "I Was Made To Love Her" ("Rien, rien, rien"), and Mary Wells' "My Guy" ("Ma fille"). It's all sharp, bright pop, with driving beats and massive hooks and joyous riffs; the lyrics François sings may or may not have anything to do with the original (his version of "Flowers In the Rain" is the third 60s French pop song I know called "The Martian," with appropriately daffy sound effects), but if he's casting himself as a peer to these folks, he's not aiming low.

But it's the other three originals that really interest me; they fit perfectly naturally in with Motown and the Swinging London, with sitar accents, punchy horn charts, and drums bashing a solid if never quite funky beat. The bright, poster-like Pop Art cover of the album is served well by the contents inside: François is a limited but effective pop/rock singer, belting out these tunes with a brio that calls to mind Neil Diamond or Tom Jones (and that's a compliment), and unlike many French pop singers of the era, he's not afraid of a little rhythm.

On the evidence of this album, he's not a flat-out rock & roller (which, the guy who co-wrote "My Way" couldn't be), but he's a sharp, effective 60s pop singer, and it's not just the James Bond cast to the album sleeve that makes me think of of Nancy Sinatra, Shirley Bassey, and Johnny Rivers — that sharp-dressed, good-looking, and solidly-showbiz tier of 60s pop that felt like it would go on forever if only those stupid punk kids with their long hair and free love hadn't gotten in the way.

Album Shuffle 003: Parliament, MOTHERSHIP CONNECTION

Casablanca · 1975

It begins in a very familiar way. "Good evening, do not attempt to adjust your radio, we have taken control as to bring you this special show." I wonder how many albums have started out with some variation on that old Outer Limits riff. It's a convenient way to try to create an "experience," demarcate your album as being in some way more singular, weirder, and more wholly of a piece, than mere experience can possibly be.

If I bring it up here, it's because if any band didn't need to rely on cheap pop-culture references to make themselves stand out as having a singular, warped vision of a universe patterned in its own image, Parliament was that band. But then I'm much more familiar with the original four Funkadelic albums, with their opening monologues that sound less like Barry White on overnight radio and more like transmissions from an alien sex-and-boogie culture. Which is why I was so disappointed the first time I heard Parliament -- by Funkadelic standards, they sounded practically normal. Might as well be the Brothers Johnson or Rick James!

And there's no denying that Parliament, at least as far as this album is concerned (I've only heard the odd single otherwise, and yes of course "Flash Light" is a monster), is easily the more accessible end of the Parliament-Funkadelic axis. But that's only on a relative scale: the alien sex-and-boogie culture is still in full effect here, if not as gleefully scatological or forthrightly experimental as on the early Funkadelic albums (or the later solo George Clintons). Bootsy Collins is still the Intergalactic Space Pimp, Bernie Worrell is still making sounds with his keyboard that no one but Jack Kirby or maybe early Jim Starlin at his most psychedelic would be able to interpret graphically, and the songs are barely songs, just grooves and collective chants, as if Communism had found its true home not in Soviet gulags or Chinese social planning, but in freak-funk combos with an eye towards sexual, racial, and narcotic liberation.

On listening to Parliament over the course of an entire album, I began to realize what my original problem with them was, not that it was ever coherent or verbalized enough to rise to the level of a problem, just a low-level aversion: they were so sonically full, packing all the elements of their production into a single space with no room left over, I couldn't separate the parts in my head. James Brown's spare funk, with its miles and miles of empty space, and Sly & the Family Stone's harder-driving funk, with its rock-derived separation of the elements, were my touchstones, and early Funkadelic built on those templates, just headed for the stars. But Parliament was the sound of the stars landing on earth, and they were just too big to fit.

I got over it, and a silly analogy helped me through. For some time now I've thought of early Funkadelic and early Black Sabbath as roughly analogous: groove-and-jam-based outfits who didn't mind moving slow and created their own eccentric mythology around which entire subcultures were born. But if Parliament is like any white rock band, I'd analogize them to Yes: overstuffed, overfull, and oversilly, with technical brio far outweighing the flimsiness of their constructed mythologies, not that it matters because we're not here for the narrative we're here to dance/whatever it is that Yes fans do.

"Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)," though nothing but an extended suite of repeated chants, is the album highlight, but the entire thing is a brilliant summation of black music to that point (and beyond — was anyone as startled as I was to hear the words "gangsta lean" in the first track?), with gospel, blues, and jazz influences seeping in (the latter mostly through Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley, sounding utterly revitalized away from James Brown's dictatorship). The title track is even partly constructed around a Canterbury-jazz version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."

Of course, all of this only matters to the chin-stroker listening on headphones (walking home through what I hesitate to call rain) — for the album's primary audience, a hot and sweaty dancefloor is its true realm, and I'm sure I'm missing a lot by not experiencing it there. Doesn't matter. I still have "Night Of The Thumpasorus Peoples" ringing in my ears, and I listened to the record last night. I don't know if it was an "experience" in the Outer Limits sense, but I'm ready to call this the best record ever to use that intro.

Album Shuffle 002: Primal Scream, SCREAMADELICA

Creation · 1991

Probably my first exposure to Primal Scream was when, ten years ago or so, I checked The Rough Guide To Rock out of the library and Napstered at least one track from each of the albums I didn't already know. (Which was most of them.) "Loaded" was what I ended up with off Screamadelica. I played it once or twice, and apart from the occasional impulse download whenever a rock-press rave got the better of me, have mostly ignored Primal Scream since.

Which is kind of a shame, as ten years ago, or maybe even five, I would have loved everything on Screamadelica that wasn't "Loaded." The Rolling-Stones-cum-acid-house sound of the record would have been a great way to bridge the gap between the classic rock I already knew and the sleek ultramodern electronic dance musics I've still never fully embraced, the odd track or album aside. But even as I proceeded to fall hard for Britpop (except Oasis), Madchester, and shoegaze, Primal Scream remained at arms' length, their tendency towards elongated dancefloor structures and repetitive jams overwhelming whatever pop-song craftsmanship Bobby Gillespie might have displayed.

I'm still charmed by the slide-guitar accents and enjoy the gospel-choir dramatics, but on the whole the record leaves me cold. It's far too late, I'm far too old and American and unimmersed in the rules of British rave culture of the early 90s for this to be more to me than an historical curiosity, a rockist justification of dance that doesn't need any justification. The few times I'm interested in the programmed beats they lay behind their Oasis-level choogle, it's because they remind me of actually great dance music of the era, the new jack swing and Euro-techno and party rap that I was listening to in 1991 because I hadn't yet been informed that rock was the only acceptable music for a white male teenager, and which in my decrepitude I'm far more interested in than yet another guitar band thinking they're making a statement by selling their guitars and buying turntables.

All of which is probably more historico-cultural animus than Screamadelica deserves. It's a perfectly fine record: a great mix, front-loaded with hot jams and winding down in its back half into more meditative, chillout paces. If I had the patience to listen to it more so that the songs became a part of me rather than representing some cultural and historical Other which I don't recognize myself in, I'd probably like it a lot more.

But there's a lot more out there to get to first. See you in another ten years, Screamadelica.

Album Shuffle 001: The Human League, DARE

Virgin · 1981

For years I've avoided this album, for reasons that don't make a lot of sense when I try to figure out what they were. I've been a fan of the League's earliest work — specifically, the "Being Boiled" single and the Reproduction LP — for some time, but have always shied away from their more popular, mass-appeal work. This is a rare consistent position for me: take any British synth-pop group of the early to mid-80s, and my favorite work of theirs will be the earliest, least crowd-pleasing I can find. I'm even the kind of nerd who likes Gloria Jones' "Tainted Love" far better than Soft Cell's, which is all kinds of ridiculous.

So if there was one reason above all others for my keeping clear of Dare, it was "Don't You Want Me." I've never liked it, even when I was young and callow and liked everything I heard on 80s radio because it was so different from the 90s music I grew up on. But "Don't You Want Me" was so garish and obvious and show-tuney — in fact it first reminded me of nothing so much as Barry Manilow's "Copacabana," and follows the modern musical-theater formula of having songs do character and narrative work; it could easily be the lynchpin of a book musical even today, and I'm actually kind of surprised it's not.

So my expectation of Dare was that it would be stuffed with these kinds of over-obvious, overproduced songs, with the girls singing as much as Phil Oakey (for some reason in my head they sang in a generic brassy backup-vocalist way, even though that's clearly not how Susan Sulley sounds on "Don't You Want Me"), and that the gloomy sci-fi aesthetic of the early Human League would buried in glitz and jackhammer beats. (Of course, even "Don't You Want Me" sounds lo-fi by today's pop standards.)

So it was actually with a sense of disappointment that I listened to Dare and found that the first eight songs were almost exactly the same Human League I knew and loved, only with some female voices buried in the mix on some choruses. Far from obvious setpieces, the songs are largely abstractions, with a surprisingly large percentage of the lyrics in the imperative mood. A few dancefloor-friendly beats and basslines have crept in, but Phil Oakey isn't going to be mistaken for Simon Le Bon any time soon; his clipped and unemotional delivery remains as satisfyingly off-putting as ever.

In fact, by the time "Don't You Want Me" rolls around, buried at the end of the album, it's a welcome relief. The industrial monochrome of the previous nine tracks dissolves into something with a pulse and lungs, and human beings rather than social abstractions take the stage. The tossed-off, crowing "ohhhh"s in the chorus are a pop gift, a release from the austerity of all the foregoing. Dare, it turns out, is about a man mostly living inside his own head who only comes to life when he realizes that he's about to lose the only thing that matters: The Girl.

Now that's a book musical.