The Human League "Dare" [1981]

Notorious as the album Lester Bangs listened to when he kicked the bucket -- that guy was on borrowed time anyway, barely kept alive from the sugar in all that cough syrup -- but The Human League's "Dare" certainly didn't help. Whether he was trying to determine at the time if Linda McCartney was responsible for the amateur single-key synth-playing on this album will never be known for sure. At first I thought it was a joke to call something a "league" that mostly seems consists of one moron with a keyboard and a drum machine, let alone a "human" one -- but it's not. What sounds like it must have been recorded by the LCD Soundsystem guy's depraved British uncle, sounding like a strained Lene Lovich demo tape sung by a guy in a dress, is really a full band's effort following several lineup changes and commercial failures. In short, it took a lot of untalented people to come up with something so flat and barren. "Dare" does live up to its billing: it "dares," alright -- dares to suck walnuts from the uncracked shell, and here it succeeds. You know it's a bad sign when you start trying to pinpoint the exact moment Bangs must have croaked while listening to this album, but it's honestly so hard to determine with so much same-sounding two-dimensional crapola. Suffice it to say The Human League paved the way for Yaz, Howard Jones and countless other synth-wankers, and as a result, I'm now in favor of the death penalty.