HUMAN LEAGUE - Credo

The temptation to freeze an image that the mirror reflects back particularly attractively belongs to the essence of every human being endowed with a certain aesthetic vocation. But vanity isn't a capital sin when it's unconscious, and stubborn devotion to style can be forgiven a thing or two. The race toward the glossiest finish, in the new decade, becomes frantic, and few escape it: there's who naively plays along, who fishes more carefully, who cosies up to the young indie star of the moment to ingratiate themselves with a callow audience — and there's also who reshuffles the cards of what once was.

Philip Oakey has lost his hair and his look today is more rugged. His backing vocalists are no longer fascinating young girls, but dignified ladies. So what? How objectionable can the urge to still have something to say really be? As with any argument, the new Credo brings both peaks and miserable lows — but they're still Human League, and we can't dismiss the whole operation in the name of their age.

During the long recording hiatus that began after the release of “Secrets” and was interrupted only by a couple of compilations, the Sheffield band never stopped their intense live activity (on more than one occasion they performed the entirety of “Give!” in concert), and after Papillon Records folded they found a new home at the trendier Wall Of Sound, the label that had already masterminded the relaunch of Grace Jones with the album “Hurricane”. Production duties were handed to fellow young Sheffielders Dean Honer and Jarrod Gosling (I Monster), who gave the eleven tracks a sound that's at once vintage — rich with (self-)references — and current, even at the cost of resorting to a few tricks that won't sit well with all the faithful.

A clear example of this approach is the opening track, “Never Let Me Go”, which brings Martin Rushent face to face with the sound of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (the team that produced “Crash”) in the twenty-first century. Susan's voice hasn't been this prominent on a Human League single since “One Man In My Heart” (from “Octopus”), and it's heavily treated, syllable by syllable, with a vocoder — yet it still holds its own against “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of”, or “All I Ever Wanted”.

Having been, right from “Reproduction” onward, suspended somewhere between cult status and mass appeal must have weighed heavily on the choice of first single. “Night People” is a pastiche hopelessly swollen with synthetic acidity, as potentially explosive as an overstuffed muffin. On first listen, the track seems like a distant relative of “A Man Could Get Lost” by Soft Cell, but the lyrics are too on-the-nose to make the whole thing even vaguely interesting. Things improve with “Sky”, with Philip Oakey tackling the surreal storytelling (here recounting a meeting with a woman, named Sky, who came from space) he's shown off in the past too.

The closeness to the style of latter-day Pet Shop Boys smacks a lot of mutual back-scratching with the duo (who featured Philip on “This Used To Be The Future”, included on the limited edition of “Yes”), but it works. The synth chips dance the tango in pairs on “Into The Night”, which however indulges too much in ‘arcade’ video-game sonics and isn't backed by a truly “winning” melody.

If we're looking to make sense of boredom, here's "Egomaniac" served up, in which Oakey would have done better to imitate himself rather than adopt a phony, muscle-bound robotics à la Dave Gahan. Here too there isn't much room for imagination: "dazzling like a diamond in the sun, egomaniac, can you hear them say 'thy will be done?'". "Get Together" is a harmless filler track that spins together glam echoes with certain rhythm 'n' blues leanings ("Mirror Man" and even "Love On The Run" were a different matter entirely).

A certain sin of ambition emerges in "Privilege", which seems to want to remind posterity of the existence of the band's early gems by clumsily recasting one of them in a mood close to Italians Do It Better's output – a paradoxical game in which the masters, short on ideas, end up aping their most brilliant pupils. Salvation from an outright flop comes in the form of "Single Minded", almost an outtake from the gorgeous sheen of "Give!" and charming even in those choral backing vocals that, at times tyrannical toward Oakey's distinctive voice, did so much damage to the band's fortunes in the past.

Respect for history forcefully returns with "Electric Shock" which, pulsing with Moroder-esque quotations (listen closely and it's a worthy heir to "From Here To Eternity", though the bassline has more in common with Belle Epoque's "Bamalama", another disco classic), isn't just a leap into the distant past but a present absolutely deserving of a spot on any self-respecting stylish fashion club playlist. The game of quotations closes with "Breaking The Chains", which instead harks back to the era and sound of "Hysteria". And of course, to close things out, there had to be a track dedicated to the stars.

In conclusion, "Credo" isn't the band's best album since "Give!", but it's not a disaster either. Shrewd in synthesizing the various stages of the group's career, without the instrumental tracks that at times weighed down "Secrets", it arrives at just the right moment given the return of esteemed colleagues like Omd and Blancmange, and the success that young bands are having by claiming for themselves what Bowie, referring specifically to Human League, had called the "sound of the future" (ranging from Goldfrapp to Mirrors). Synthesis is not a condemnation, but the reality of a task that is rescued by just a handful of clear ideas, muddled by a series of missteps born of touching ambition. A fault, however, no graver than that of the many, too many pretenders to an origin that is untouchably dated.

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20/03/2011