Blancmange - Wanderlust

Facts Vinyl LP pressing. 2018 album from the veteran British synthpop outfit. Ten songs composed by Neil Arthur, and arranged, co-produced and mixed with Benge (Wrangler/Creep Show) at the latter's Memetune Studios in Cornwall. This is the pair's third album together following their Fader First Light album in June 2017 and they also collaborated on last year's Blancmange opus, Unfurnished Rooms - described by Mojo as 'detached, wistful, touched by computer-age unease.' Wanderlust is focussed on similar themes but there's a new energy to the approach - wistfulness turning to anger; dislocation morphing into a powerful desire to be somewhere else, and always a sense of someone fighting for forward motion, dreams, family and the joys of life while seeing, as Arthur puts it, 'the pretence of a normal world being erased.' This spirit is also in the music, which is vital, percussive, full of analogue machine-noise and chunky basslines.