Listening to The Human League’s Credo is a bit like listening to one of Ray Davies’s more recent outings – you know they’ve both said all they have to say years ago, but there is still something very pleasing about just hearing them do their thing. I use the word "say", advisedly, as part of Credo’s charm is its prosaic half-spoken words, strong on storylines yet purposely piling banality on top of cliché, where “stranger” rhymes with “danger” and we learn things like “There is a place the night people go/ There is a place that only night people know”.
Musically things haven’t changed a great deal since the 1980s, with a mix of the harder Mk1 and poppier post-Heaven 17 sounds. There's a lot of fairly DIY synth-work that reminds you of when technology first liberated musical people who didn’t really play instruments. The analogue synthesisers have warmth and charm, the dance beats are insistent, and miraculously Phil Oakey’s baritone and the girls' (Sulley and Catherall’s) vocals haven’t worn a single inch in 30 years. Although it comes pretty close, Credo narrowly avoids being straight nostalgia by dint of its sheer commitment and honesty. Oakey is, after all, such a character that it’s no effort to believe that he’s really still involved in the clubs and bars of Sheffield and Leeds.
The album is best where the narrative is strongest, and the standout track is “Sky”, a story about an alien. Other highlights are love song “Never Let Me Go” and “Privilege”, one of the odder recent songs to be about financial greed. Throughout the album the songs tread a nice line between dance and pop. And yet, despite everything, it is just difficult to imagine exactly what kind of audience would really go for a Human League album in the second decade of the 21st century. Northern clubs, perhaps. Gay clubs, almost certainly. But despite its engaging manners and winning moments, this album is unfortunately likely to end up, like Secrets a decade ago, as a bit of a curio.
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