#663 Human League - Dare

If you know Don't You Want Me, and I think you do, you get the basic idea, but three things to know if we're using that as a starting point:

• That song is actually better than you might realize, painting a curiously complex narrative that you could have missed if you dismissed it past the hook.
• That's the last song on the album, a truly unusual place to slot it and a truly strange way to end the album. Strange, possibly brilliant, evoking the uncharacteristically poppy songs that would later close albums like Loveless and Emergency and I.
• The rest of the album is a lot stranger that song might lead you to believe. A lot stranger and a lot better.

This is arty new wave cusping into synthpop, icy and detached and strangely listenable, still exciting, sending shockwaves informing Britpop's disinterest, Madchester's dancy edge, and 10's 80's revival bands like Cut Copy.

The central conflict here is between detachment and longing, between alienation and an irrepressible alien heartbeat. It's all summed up in the album's best known track, pushing you away and then asking, absentmindedly, don't you want me? The conflict and complexity belies the term synthpop: this is music that still, always, strives for more 4/5