A decade after their hit "So Alive", Love & Rockets are back in force with a new sound, a hybrid of Daniel Ash's sparse songwriting and of techno turbulences .
If the album starts with the moderately ambiant Orbital-y "Lift", it's just to prepare for the techno fury of the following "RIP 20c", "Resurrection Hex" & "Holy Fool", which have unexpectedly set fire to club dancefloors. Of course, this techno conversion of an ex new wave band could be qualified as opportunistic, but while U2 and others crashed and burned, Love & Rockets brillantly succeeds in its conversion.
There are many reasons for this. First, Daniel Ash's music has always been close to the hypnotic unstructured style of techno.
Second, his robotic voice is in perfect osmosis with electronic music, what Underworld and others like Fluke, seem to have understood for a while. Finally, the experiment begun on the last 2 albums could only logically end up in a succesful electronic mutation.
The result is an album waving between usual Love & Rockets style such as "Deep Deep Down" and "Pink Flamingo", or techno fever such as "My Drug" and the singles.
While some celebrate the Bauhaus resurrection, which is only a pretext for their label to launch the efforts of Love & Rockets and of the atrophied Peter Murphy, whose career has taken a short turn since the divorce with Bauhaus's musical core, I can only exclaim "Bauhaus is dead, Long live Love & Rockets".
Love & Rockets Lift
