With a number of song titles that either appropriate or approximate 80s (and occasionally 90s) hits or otherwise reek of cliche - 'Rio'; 'Feels Like Heaven'; 'Song 1'; 'Fools Paradise'; 'Smoke and Mirrors' - Adventure have produced an album that's not so much 80s retro, as a historically accurate reconstruction. Mostly, they sound like 'Dare' era Human League, complete with slightly flat male lead vocals and slightly iffy female backing vocals atop super-cheap, 2-bit analogue synths and primitive-sounding percussion that sound like the kind of drum machines that were available circa 1982 (i.e. nothing like drums, but they produce rhythms).
In the main, it's bearable, in that it does what it does reasonably well. 'Fools Paradise' manages to mash a discofied rip-off of the Cure's 'Closedown' (with genuine 80s-sounding 'pow!pow!' synthetic drums) into something that approximates the Thompson Twins in collision with the Scissor Sisters. It's every bit as horrible as you might expect.
The main issue I have with 'Lesser Known' - a title that surely seals its own fate - is that by being so deeply entrenched in recreating music that was once futuristic, but has since been overtaken by infinite technological strides, it ties itself to not only a certain point in musical and cultural evolution that has lost its relevance simply because modernism is doomed to become dated, historical, but also becomes an exercise in reproduction rather than composition. Reconstructing something from the past with an attention to detail and authenticity is one thing, but the 80s synth music Adventure revisit was at its heart radically inauthentic, superficial, disposable, plastic. It was music of the now. Thirty years on, it isn't a case of having lost its relevance per se, so much as a case of nostalgia not being what it used to be.
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We've seen a real shift in the general approach to 80s music lately. Whereas once it was considered 'cheesy' and was appreciated with a sense of postmodern irony, it's now being taken seriously. In itself, that's ok, I suppose, but Adventure take this straight-faced historical re-enactment that step too far. The musical equivalent of LARP, it goes way beyond cool and sinks to the bottom of a swamp of Xeroxed lameness.
Adventure on MySpace
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