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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: The Human League’s “A Very British Synthesizer Group”

Across three vinyl LPs, the tech-heavy work of stonily cool singer Philip Oakey and a handful of knob twiddlers, drum machinists and early sequencer artists from the post-punk ’70s onward is presented as a road map tracing the robotic travels of synthesized sound from rigid electronic punk to synth pop and 808 soul, with the help of brand names such as Martin Rushent and Jam & Lewis as its guideposts. This was the real punk, the rue revolution, in many minds. That this machine muzik was the product of Sheffield, England, gives the Human League’s tone a perfectly British stiff upper lip as Oakey, Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh—just barely on the heels of guitar punk’s rage and the age of the Sex Pistols—began producing the murk and gurgle death disco of “Being Boiled,” the silvery industrialism of “The Dignity Of Labour [Part 3]” and the robo-romantic “Empire State Human.” Crack-snap covers of Mick Ronson’s “Only After Dark” and Iggy/Bowie’s Berlin-period “Nightclubbing” sound dated, dark but cute, a steely sound that doesn’t exactly prepare you for the doomy Orwellian (“The Sound Of The Crowd”), but rather 1981’s perky-pop Dare and the hit-machine to come (“Don’t You Want Me, Baby,” etc.). Smashing.

—A.D. Amorosi