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Various Artists: Reproductions
BY THOMAS KANE
In 1981, Human Lea-gue played Sakagawea to the music world's Lewis and Clark. It plugged in its Yamaha keyboards and showed the way to an electronic, head-nodding promised land. But if the Human League could have foreseen the outcome of its experiments, it might have left its synthesizers in the closet. For as quickly as it put the pop in synth-pop, the Stephen Merritt revolution (Merritt not included) began to chisel away at it. However, on Reproductions—a tribute to the Human League—the genre's heavy-hitters (Merritt, Momus, Barcelona, etc.) go to war against those qualities which make synth-pop pretentious and mind-numbingly boring. And for the most part, the good guys win.
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Reproductions may flaunt the technological and stylistic advances that synth-pop has made, but it is hardly consumed by the times. The album is aggressive without being abrasive, constantly looking back to the relative simplicity of the neo-bubble gum culture in which synth-pop first flourished. It is because of this attention to history that Reproductions anoints melody as its first priority. Evident on Barcelona's "Mirror Man," the album deliberately replaces the stereotypical brooding, monotone voice with one of contagious playfulness. The album becomes almost a celebration of the way in which the current trend of cerebral (and inaccessible) craftsmanship can give way to a limitless creative energy that is at the heart of synthesized music. Even when stylistic invention is at its strongest (on Ladytron's "Open Your Heart," for example), there still exists a pressure to balance mechanical production and human personality. Paradoxically, Reproductions attacks redundancy with its endorsement of another strain of redundancy: pop sensibility. With a return to musicality, the album rejects the doldrums of music-induced introspection in favor of a uniformity with which the listener cannot help but sing along.
Reproductions possesses a give-and-take quality that vaults it past most tribute albums. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Merritts' assuming the female vocal duties on "Don't You Want Me?" His bass-driven crooning symbolically marks both the inevitability of reinvention and a total unwillingness to dissociate synth-pop from the ideals of its founding fathers and mothers. (March) —Thomas Kane
All materials © 2001 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
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