ALBUM REVIEWS

Heads We Dance
LOVE TECHNOLOGY
THIS IS FAKE DIY RECORDS 1.6.09
@www.vanguard-online.co.uk


Let’s start with the one that sums it up. Love In The Digital Age has a lovely soaring line for the chorus combined with a pile-up of every cliché anyone invented in the seventies about robotics and love. Lyrically, it strip-mines the territory of alienation and computerisation. Musically, like the rest of the album, it is packed with jerky (robotic, you see….) rhythms, sequencers, vocoder effects, etc. It follows an even more packed and portentous album opener, The Human Touch.

Heads We Dance are a Leeds band that I have somehow avoided seeing but have made their name through radio and internet, thriving in the incestuous world of “you remix mine, I’ll remix yours”. They’ve gone for a singular and timely vision, jumping on the electro boat and throwing in some retro-futurism. It’s like locking The Human League in a box with Kraftwerk, eighties disco records and a pile of apocalyptic science fiction novels.

When The Sirens Sound is, you guessed it, a song about love under the threat of annihilation. A strangely subdued choice for a single. Computer Love is a cover of the old Kraftwerk track, already knowingly dated in its day, with a faded retro glow. The cover version is a little pointless when the star is the cheesy melody and the camp lyrics. The Gold City has throbbing patterns that recall the electro disco of the era of Donna Summer and Giorgio Morodor. My Heart Is Set On You is more of the same – semi-ironic, knowing, lyrics and complicated patterns, synths ebbing and flowing in different stereo channels. We get knowing winks and cultural titbits – THX-1138 is referenced (Steven Speilberg’s first feature). The song titled UBIK is, of course, a nod to Phillip K Dick’s seriously warped sci-fi novel. Aldous Huxley is referenced. And so on.

The disappointment for me is that the album is robotic and uses dance technology but doesn’t SWING. It has the attributes of dance but doesn’t make me want to dance in the way that, say, The Filthy Dukes do.

So, there you have it; a futuristic album nostalgic for the past vision of the future.

Ross McGibbon

www.headswedance.com