Happy 40th Anniversary to The Human League’s third studio album Dare, originally released in the UK October 16, 1981.
Much of my early music education developed based on the kind of stuff my elder brother was into. He was a conduit to a world beyond the songs crackling through the static of the Top 40 radio that my own musical experience was limited to. Four years older than me, my brother explored music through friends' recommendations and via crate digging at local record stores to discover something new and exciting.
Such a discovery came in the form of The Human League. Pioneers in the electro-synth movement, The Human League had produced a few dark and mainly avantgarde albums before a divisive split saw a shuffling of its members. This new collective would release an album in 1981 that would define the sound of early ‘80s synthpop and influence the shape and sonics of years to follow.
With the primary songwriters exiting the band, frontman Phil Oakey and remaining member Philip Adrian Wright looked to refashion the band with a shift from the experimental sounds of preceding releases towards a more pop-oriented plane.
This meant pulling in touring keyboardist Ian Burden and guitarist/songwriter Jo Callis to help flesh out the melodies along with two new vocal additions in Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley, who brought a brightness to Oakey's deep vocals.
Rounding out the new collective was producer Martin Rushnet, who was brought in to help a band without their primary songwriters find their feet and focus. In doing so, he helped shape the soundwaves being produced by an array of synths into structured and carefully crafted songs.
The result was Dare, an album that seemed to exist in a vast void of whitespace echoed on the iconic album cover design. The sounds created on Roland, Korg, and Casio synths and newly arrived Linn drum machines felt like transmissions from the future.
On Dare, Oakey's gloomy baritone punches through sawing synth lines and grounds each song in real human emotion and the desire for connection. This is present on album opener "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of" and against the shunting drum pattern of "Open Your Heart," where Oakey's vocals strain with an aching for more over a melody run that rivals the catchiness of melodic maestros ABBA.
With a stalking euphoria, "The Sound of the Crowd" builds to a climax that gives birth to the sound of synthpop, and best reflects the burgeoning (albeit short-lived) New Romantic era. It's an uplifting track that, despite its sparseness, feels plush and full. Such an approach would be a mainstay of Dare—creating a sense of warmth and fullness in a bleak and sparse setting.
Dare's decidedly gloomy mid-point still offers little glints of sheen in the moody paranoia of "Darkness," the frantic rhythms of "Do or Die" and the eerie, nightmare-inducing reworking of the film score "Get Carter" twisted into an airy, high pitch call out that would feel right at home in today's Squid Game landscape.
The oppressive fog of "I Am The Law" settles around you as cascading synths trickle down and Oakey's authoritarian narrative plays out. It's a beautiful moment of dread and allows Oakey's limited vocal range to come into its own.
An unexpected highlight of the album is "Seconds," with its recounting of the Kennedy assassination with a commentary on Lee Harvey Oswald. Against a pulsing countdown beat and histrionic synths, the track is totally captivating and powerfully expressive. As a kid, I used to listen to this track over and over, drawn in by the visual picture it painted. It is Dare's crowning achievement in terms of production and its most stacked and layered. Purely magnetic.
Out of the darkness comes two of Dare's most pop-focused tracks, including the dance-inspired "Love Action (I Believe in Love)" with its fluttering main riff and shape-shifting soundscapes capped off by a rousing spoken word middle eight.
The other track is, of course, the track for which The Human League is best known for, the obsessive tail of rejection "Don't You Want Me." With its A Star Is Born narrative of a spurned Svengali, "Don't You Want Me" is instantly iconic. The ticking sequencing, the heavy bass melody, the catchy as hell singalong chorus, and the at-odds duet between Oakley and Sulley. Despite initial misgivings over its strength as a single, "Don't You Want Me" became the cornerstone for Dare's success and influence as it topped charts worldwide.
The beauty of Dare is that it sounded unlike anything else on the radio, and to this day, has its own unique sound and place in music history. It created the space through which music from that point on would filter through, with an increased incorporation of synths into pop and rock’s landscape and a shift toward more drum machine-driven grooves. The sounds created on Dare continue to reverberate through pop and hip-hop. It is detached and distinctly cool. And despite being 40 years old, Dare still feels like a message from the future.
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