After a six-year hiatus, former
Depeche Mode
member
Alan Wilder
revived his
Recoil
project with the full-length
Subhuman
, a dreary album of dark soundscapes and a
blues
singer. Taking his
"Electro Blues for Bukka White"
track off 1992's
Bloodline
and blowing it up into a loose concept album,
Wilder
has hired
Texas blues
man
Joe Richardson
to contribute lyrics, guitar, and his swampy vocals to the album. The opening
"Prey"
is the grand meeting between
Richardson
's creeping
and
's creepy electronics, while the satisfying
"5000 Years"
finds
acting as
's producer until he dissolves the tune into
noise
sound collage
. The rest of their output sounds like a clever soundtrack searching for a moody movie, which is just to say it's both convincing and forgettable. The other track of note is the dreamy
"Allelujah"
which finds guest vocalist
Carla Trevaskis
speaking in ethereal tongues and sounding quite a bit like a
Kate Bush
sample. There's heaviness to the rest of the album that ponderously plods until numbness sets in, plus a collage in the booklet that perfectly illustrates
's big problem. In the collage, an antique picture of families frolicking at the beach is combined with an atom bomb exploding overhead, and then two showroom dummies are haphazardly planted in the foreground.
is equally hackneyed and entry-level postmodern, but like the collage, it's skillfully polished and best suited for lovers of dark, incongruous genre blending. ~ David Jeffries