Camouflage are one of the few German bands to have been making music successfully at home and abroad for the last couple of decades. “The Great Commandment” (1987) and “Love Is A Shield” (1989) were actually worldwide hits. After four albums, Camouflage felt it was time to experiment. This phase reached its zenith with the album Spice Crackers in 1995 – the most daring, most interesting work they ever released. Electropop tracks sit side by side with hypnotic, repetetive, spheric tracks. Now, 30 years later, “Spice Crackers” will finally be released on vinyl for the first time!
Heiko Maile, Camouflage founder member and producer of “Spice Crackers”, has this to say about working on the album: On our previous productions, we started out with just a few…
Category: synth-pop
Joseph Oxley has long made music that feels like tuning in to a pirate radio station broadcasting from the 1990s. As TVAM, his go-to staples are saturated guitar, acid keys, dreamy shoegaze-frayed vocals, and beats like the stamp of a thousand Doc Martens.
Ruins, however, flicks the dial towards something far more personal, its once-bright palette now refracted to near-monochrome.
The emotional shift is immediately obvious. “Comfort Collar” opens with a heavy-footed pulse and a smear of synth like blue neon through rain-streaked glass. It’s oddly comforting in that slightly seamy way a goth disco can be. From there, the record moves through titles like “The Gloom,” “In Memory” and “The Haunted,”…
Pet Shop Boys release a Blu-ray/CD of their concert film Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live at the Royal Arena Copenhagen. The film captures the spectacular stage show of the Pet Shop Boys tour with dazzling visuals and a bumper set list packed with classic hits, including “West End Girls,” “Suburbia,” “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money),” “Left To My Own Devices,” “Rent,” “Domino Dancing,” “Love Comes Quickly,” “Always On My Mind,” and “It’s A Sin.”
The film was recorded at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen in July 2023 as part of Pet Shop Boys’ critically acclaimed Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live Tour. Directed by the renowned David Barnard, the film was captured using a 14-camera 4K shoot to ensure an immersive experience for viewers.
Phantasmagoria: A bizarre or fantastic combination; a constantly shifting, complex succession of things seen or imagined. These definitions wholly encapsulate the circumstances that shaped the narrative structure and exquisite tonal palette coursing through Ani Glass’s thrilling second LP. Its long-awaited arrival ends a five-year gap since the Welsh-Cornish artist released her critically acclaimed solo debut, Mirores, a momentous milestone in her career that was unfortunately usurped by a benign brain tumour diagnosis. Glass’s latest material, on which her production style demonstrates great growth, is a sumptuous synth-pop meditation on processing that traumatic period whilst untangling the experiences and emotions that steered her to…
Continuing Pet Shop Boys’ infrequent series of remix collections, Disco 5 mainly focuses on the duo’s own remixes and productions for other artists, like Disco 4 did, rather than outside remixes of their own material, like the first three volumes. Of course, when the pair remix or produce a song for another artist, they pretty much turn it into a Pet Shop Boys song, and considering that the majority of Disco 5 consists of material created during the 2020s, it’s close to being a PSB album that happens to have a lot of guest vocalists on it. Two of the set’s highlights are minor rarities that hadn’t appeared on a PSB collection until now. The duo produced several selections on the soundtrack to the 1993 film The Crying Game, including Boy George’s hit title track, but…
Backtracking a bit from previously issued volumes of the series, Musik Music Musique 1979: The Roots of Synth Pop functions as a sort of prequel, mapping out the blueprint of the new wave revolution of the ’80s, from synth-heavy post-punk and art rock to some of synth pop’s earliest chart-toppers. It’s not as if electronic instruments weren’t prominent in popular music before 1979, but synthesizers were clearly well on their way to being a defining characteristic of the musical landscape. The set starts with the Buggles’ “Technopop,” proposing a name for the music of the future — Kraftwerk would later give a song a similar title on 1986’s Electric Café, which originally had the working title Techno Pop as well, and decades later, a reissue retroactively bore…
…”Microwave,” the 1989 track from Japanese singer Kyoko Koizumi, opens with a plasticky creak and a kitchen timer ring. Adding in crunchy guitar samples, a thudding drum machine and a house-inspired keyboard solo, the chart-topping vocalist embraced the playful spirit that defined Japan’s experimental ’80s genre, known as techno kayō, or techno pop. Positioned on the B-side of the new vinyl-only compilation, Techno Kayō Vol. 1: Japanese Techno Pop 1981-1989, “Microwave” proves that this sometimes-underestimated genre still has the power to surprise.
Lovingly compiled by Toshihito “Dubby” Maeyama (owner of Onda records) and Antal Heitlager (co-founder of Amsterdam’s renowned Rush Hour label), Vol. 1 sets out to establish…
Lia Braswell’s Rising is forceful and expressive. Each song sounds an individual statement without there being any real sonic outliers (or weak points, for that matter) in the bunch. This makes for an intense listen, but a rich and engaging one too. The musical backbone is a relentless dance rock, mixing the thundering beats and assertive electronics of Pet Shop Boys or the Eurythmics with the breakneck, organic rush of Florence + The Machine and the complex, artful freedom of Wye Oak.
“Out of Sight” belongs to the 1980s, with a thudding, dead-eyed beat, glancing, urgent bleeps, and big burns of synthesizer that curl into a spacious instrumental bridge. “One Too Many” is another for the Less Than Zero crowd with some Duran Duran menace programmed…
Cherry Red, longtime home for Howard Jones’ catalogue, release an unheard set from the beginning of his career.
Live at the Marquee, finds the inimitable singer-songwriter-keyboardist wowing a crowd at the late London venue just before his commercial breakthrough in 1983.
The wholly unreleased show, was unearthed from master tapes when the label began compiling bonus material for reissues of his former Warner catalogue in 2018, and remixed by Jones himself for this release. (It appears from the metadata that three of these Marquee tracks were originally released as B-sides to early singles.) The packaging includes rare and unreleased photos of Jones from the period.
When the then-28-year-old Jones took the stage…
Marc Almond has personally curated this celebratory 2CD expanded re-issue of his lesser known 2016 electro-pop album. Lesser known simply because, hitherto, it has only had a limited vinyl release in Germany.
Silver City, now a definitive 20 track techno-pop opus, was written and produced by Marc with celebrated cult German electronic music production duo Starcluster and is Marc Almond’s “most synth laden body of work since Soft Cell” (Electricity Club, 2016). It is indeed, a sheer joy to hear Marc Almond’s deft and distinctive vocals alongside a vast array of vintage analogue synthesisers in this resplendently authentic, retro-futuristic setting; an album that provides an eloquent refracted echo of his formative synth-pop work in revered…
The 12″ single redefined music and the way we move to it, something that’s celebrated on the fantastic new four-CD collection from Cherry Red Records, Extended Stimulation: 12″ Pop Adventures on the Dancefloor 1983-1988. While 12″ vinyl is generally associated with disco, electronic, and hip-hop, this box set explores just how revolutionary it could be for traditional pop music, featuring tracks from the likes of New Order, Simply Red, the Human League, Duran Duran, Talk Talk, Pet Shop Boys, and many others.
However, these may not be the songs as most people remember them. That’s because everything here is either a remix (or extended mix) of some kind, originally released on 12″ vinyl. A little history lesson may be in order. Before the 12″…
Released in 1989, Def, Dumb & Blonde is Debbie Harry’s third, solo, studio album.
Although Debbie Harry‘s popularity had decreased by the late ’80s, 1989 wasn’t a bad year for her at all. That year, Blondie’s former lead vocalist successfully portrayed a struggling singer on the brilliant but underrated CBS crime drama Wiseguy, and demonstrated that she could still have considerable fun in the studio.
Under the direction of hit producer Mike Chapman – who had worked with Blondie, as well as with everyone from Sweet to Scandal – Harry delivers an eclectic CD that isn’t in a class with a Blondie treasure like Parallel Lines but nonetheless has a lot going for it. Much of this new wave-ish pop/rock and European-flavored dance music…
Across the world, cassette tapes have often carried far more than music, serving as tools of defiance, memory, and belonging. In Somalia and Somaliland, songs recorded on battered tapes crossed seas and borders, keeping scattered communities connected through poetry and melody. In Palestine, revolutionary anthems slipped through checkpoints and broadcast the sound of resistance where radio could not reach. In Afghanistan, banned voices lived on in bootleg cassettes passed hand to hand, their melodies vehemently resisting the silence imposed upon them.
In Iran, too, the cassette has been used as both a weapon and a refuge: First used by Khomeini to spread his revolutionary sermons, it was reclaimed by Iranian pop artists fighting to…
…remastered & with 5 bonus tracks.
“Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day”, maintains Paul McGann’s character near the start of Withnail and I. He plays Marwood – the ‘I’ of the title – in a drunken and druggy but decidedly unpsychedelic cinematic glimpse into the late 1960s. The film initially flopped in cinemas at the height of 1980s yuppiedom, only to find cult adoration (and over quotation) via subsequent release on video. Everything has its right time in the end. And so it is with Henry Badowski’s one and only album Life Is a Grand, which is finally getting the reissue it justly deserves after all but disappearing, along with its creator, to near complete indifference following its release in 1981. Indeed Badowski himself seems more…
…From benders in Seven Sisters and the smell of petrol stations off the North Circular, to mourning drifting friendships and ‘what could have been’, Real Lies’ critically acclaimed 2015 debut saw the electronic duo oscillate between the existential and the quintessential at whim.
Similarly, 2022’s Lad Ash saw a delicate balance between nostalgia-laden reflections (queues outside the fish shop and post-rave disorientation) with musings on self-expression. With We Will Annihilate Our Enemies, Kharas and Pat King continue to carry the torch for modern angst, and learning to love it in the process – pulling from an even broader palette of influences to create their most mature, refined work yet.
Pat King pushes their anthemic sound further.
…remastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road.
After breaking through to massive U.K. fame with his 1979 album The Pleasure Principle, and its chart-topping new wave isolationist anthem “Cars,” Gary Numan got darker, more intense, and more solemn on his second proper solo album, 1980’s Telekon. The shifts in his work were happening quickly, with both Replicas (the last of two albums Numan made with his punkier group Tubeway Army) and The Pleasure Principle being released in 1979, and the songs for Telekon being written and recorded by the end of that year, but held back for a release in September of 1980 as not to flood the market. Telekon was, in part, Numan’s response to overnight success, with songs that alluded cryptically to conclusions and…
…features exclusive remixes from artists such as Midnight Magic, Prins Thomas, and Lindstrøm.
Nora Schjelderup is one of Norway’s leading DJs, and is also the creative force behind Ora the Molecule, who have just released Dance Therapy, which might be the most accessible avant-garde disco pop concept album you’ll hear this year.
Ora the Molecule has existed since around 2015, releasing a series of singles that were compiled on Human Safari in 2021. Human Safari is filled with modern Euro-synthwave, with just enough throwback sounds to conjure up the feel of a lost Thompson Twins album for fans of 1980s technopop.
While Human Safari is technically Ora the Molecule’s debut record, Schjelderup has…
…deluxe 3CD set include 19 extra tracks – focusing on lesser-known B-sides, late ’80s and early ’90s albums, and even material that Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie released in the ’90s under the name Babble – along with the premiere CD release of ‘Into the Gap Live’, the audio of a longform video release from 1984 that was recently issued on vinyl for Record Store Day.
The 1980s were heady times for synthesizers and drum machines. Ushering out the distorted three-chord guitars and traditional drum/bass/guitar lineups of the punk and stadium era rock of the decade that preceded it.
New Wave bands like OMD, Human League, and The Pet Shop Boys created a dance-friendly genre that was light on sneers and anger but…
Ultravox’s 1984 best-of compilation The Collection sold over 2 million copies worldwide after its release and went triple platinum in the UK. It includes the band’s first 14 singles released between 1980 and 1984. The best-known tracks include the cult song “Vienna”, the anti-nuclear war anthem “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes”, the new wave classic “All Stood Still” as well as “Hymn”, “The Voice” and “Reap The Wild Wind”.
Now “The Collection” is being re-released remastered in various formats with different bonus material. This newly remastered compilation has been expanded into a 4CD/2Blu-ray Deluxe Edition. The set includes a second volume of “The Collection” with a further 14 singles from 1986 to 2024, alternative and unreleased versions.
Fully remastered and features previously unreleased B-sides, rarities and remixes by Todd Terry, The Beatmasters, Sly & Robbie and more.
žYou may not know his name, but you’ll probably recognize his voice. Since the death of Klaus Nomi, Somerville has reigned as the best white falsetto singer in pop music; his soaring voice propelled Bronski Beat and the Communards to respectable chart positions (especially in Europe) during the 1980s, and his return to musical activity finds him in excellent form. Dare to Love doesn’t really break much new ground for Somerville. He’s still working the club floor with disco-inflected dance-pop, and his melodic sense is still as strong as ever — from the airborne melodic lines of “Heartbeat” to the down-and-dirty funk of…