Human League

If there's one album where the British glories of electronic avant-garde and easy-listening music find their ideal synthesis, it's "Reproduction". Hailing from Sheffield, the same city as the analog masters Cabaret Voltaire, and building on a path begun in 1977 under the name The Future, Human League delivered in 1979 the first English pop record played entirely on electronic instrumentation, absorbing the lessons of Berlin-era Bowie, Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk, yet bending them into something entirely new.

Preceded a year earlier by the single "Being Boiled/Circus Of Death" and by a few months by the EP "The Dignity Of Labour" (both included among the "bonus" tracks on the currently available reissue), "Reproduction" not only lays down the coordinates of the synth-pop that would run rampant in the years to come, but also stands as one of the cornerstones of the entire new wave movement, distilling the tenets that lead from post-punk austerity to dark existentialism, while brushing against the inclinations of retro-futurist romanticism. Anyone expecting to find here the accessible, dancefloor-friendly and somewhat crowd-pleasing atmosphere of the multi-million-selling, hugely popular "Give" (released in 1981 in the wake of the split that saw the departure of Martyn Ware and Ian Craig-Marsh, who went on to found Heaven 17), with its easily digestible singles, will have to think again.

While it's true that "Reproduction", as noted, is a record of songs rather than abstractions, it can't equally be said that these songs were conceived to be danced to — with the exception of the single "Empire State Human", which, despite the epic gallop of a memorable refrain, still can't shake off the dark, subterranean moods that permeate the whole record. Equally sinister and dark is the whispered keyboard intro that opens the synthetic punk explosion of "Almost Medieval", whose disorienting double-hit drum machine counterpoints an equally percussive synthesizer phrasing, in a robotic sprout led by the warm baritone of Phil Oakey, guiding its martial stride by the hand: try to draw plausible comparisons if you can, and look for possible influences. You won't find any.

If “Almost Medieval” is the roaring army that sweeps everything before it, “Circus Of Death” is the battlefield left in its wake, the inescapable creep of darkness swallowing up the last flickers of fire, the macabre spinning of a carousel only accidentally spared from the disaster. Here too, and if anything even more so, the scene is dominated by Oakey's luminous vocal register, thanks to a mood closer to spoken theatre than to actual singing. And there are melodies, like the ones that crash against the beat of the artificial heart that starts (re)beating in “The Path Of Least Resistance”, a prelude to the sci-fi gallop of “Blind Youth”, where the interplay of echoes and cross-references between a distant past and an unknown future, which shapes the whole album, surfaces in the line: “Dehumanisation/ is such a big word/ It's been around since/ Richard The Third”. It's the song of someone who positions themselves, with detached aplomb, before an eternal tomorrow that on one hand terrifies, and on the other demands to be lived: blind is youth, just as blind is the fate that follows it.

The verses of “The Word Before Last” are spoken reiterations, the hypermodernism of an anxiety thought out loud, its eye unexpectedly trained on the present of the time: “I spent a bad day yesterday/ With a man and a picture of himself/ The tape was running and the Tv turned/…and described Mrs. Thatcher's first three months in power as disastrous”, right up to the sarcastic superhuman posturing of the already-mentioned “Empire State Human” (“I want to be tall/ As big as a wall/ And if I'm not tall/ then I will crawl”). Here, for the lucky (?) owners of the vinyl, “side one” comes to a close. This detail is anything but secondary, since waiting for us on “side b” is the enchanting “Morale… You've Lost That Loving Feeling”, which marks a sudden change of mood. It's an ambient suite lasting almost ten minutes which, despite the introduction penned by the band itself (“Morale…”, precisely), is actually a reinterpretation of a 60s song made famous by The Righteous Brothers. And it's also one of those rare cases where the cover outshines the original: a successful pop tune of its era, just 3 minutes long, transformed by Ware and co. into a slow, stretched-out nocturne, dense with aching melancholy.

“Austerity/Girl One”, with its synth-and-voice monophonies, brings us back onto a mood and movement not unlike “Blind Youth”, while closing the album is the synthetic clap of “Zero As A Limit”, building to a crescendo that sends the human league machine hurtling toward its final crash. Because “Reproduction” crashes, indelibly marking, with its roar, the entire history of electronic music.

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01/02/2006