Electronic Sound July 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 24

ALBUM REVIEWS

demanding music with synths while
flaunting an uptight and confrontational
sense of mission about them. The
group’s ‘Digital Stimulation’ album was
first released in 1980, taking blueprints
created by Suicide, Chrome and Devo’s
challenging early work (and this just at
the point when Devo themselves moved
into the purer, radio-friendly synthpop of
‘Freedom Of Choice’), and pulling them
apart and repurposing them for their
own, possibly even more intense antirock agenda.

UNITS

Digital Stimulation
FUTURISMO

San Francisco, 1980. Is the world
ready for the amphetamine rush of
synthpunk?
For the UK fan, synthpunk was a genre
that didn’t really happen. The minimal
synthpop of John Foxx, Gary Numan
and The Human League which ruled
the roost in 1980 always betrayed a
quintessentially British pop sensibility,
rooted as it was in the early 70s glories
of David Bowie, Roxy Music and T-Rex.
But in the USA, there was an altogether
more urgent and serious feeling in the
musical underground, peopled by a
seemingly desperate underclass whose
spiritual roots lay with the likes of The
Stooges, and who attached an almost
epic sense of meaning and importance
to what they were doing. They were the
damaged little brothers and sisters of
post-Vietnam alienation, growing up in a
violent and divided society which made
the tea-time telly swearing of the Sex
Pistols look positively parochial. And
some of them embraced the synthesiser
as their vV