Neil Arthur is on a mission. He was once one half of Blancmange, the British synth-pop band most famous for middle-sized hits of the early 1980s, songs such as “Don’t Tell Me” and “Living on the Ceiling”. He has been the group’s sole member since 2011 and, recently, he’s been busy. Two albums came out last year, the playful Semi Detached and the instrumental, experimental Nil by Mouth, both decent outings that threw off the shackles of being a tribute act to his younger self. A few months later, Commuter 23 appears, a successful continuation of the same mission.
This isn’t to say that the new album sounds contemporary. It has, instead, a classy retro-futurism, in the same way that OMD’s last album English Electric did. Blancmange now successfully mine a territory somewhere between John Foxx, Kraftwerk and 1990s post-clubbing analogue ambience. The best song on the album, by a distance, is “Jack Knife”, a haunted ode to a lorry driver, “so far from home”, being put on hold on his mobile phone as he tries to sort out his situation. Its opening is worth quoting at length: “Feeling really sorry for the jack-knifed lorry/The driver on his phone/Speaking to a drone in a cold and damp call centre/South of Leominster.” It takes its mundane premise and builds a lovely song, mustering cosmic melancholy akin to Kraftwerk’s “Neon Lights” overlaid with clanging The Edge-out-of U2 guitar tones. It is superb.
The rest of the album cannot live up to this high point but, nonetheless, contains plenty of worthwhile songs and instrumentals, including the bleepy Nineties rave-chill of the title track, the bullish robot pop of “Last Night (I Dreamt I Had A Job)”, the squelchy, bouncy electro-brass oomph of “NHS”, and the sinisterly forlorn, poetic Vangelis-does-Bladerunner tones of “Waiting All The Time”.
Back in the 1979-1980 glory days of Gary Numan and John Foxx, JG Ballard was a key reference point and Commuter 23 has intimations of that writer’s interest in the fusion of dystopian sci-fi with prosaic, everyday reality. Along with its two predecessors, it sets Neil Arthur up not as a spent force, but as a reinvigorated, offbeat talent worth keeping an eye on.
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