- Label
- Copenhagen Records
- Release date
- 2nd June 2008
- Genre
- Pop
- Buy this album
- Order CD
It's time to party like it's 1981
Danish six-piece Alphabeat are retro-fetishists and This Is Alphabeat is so hung up on early 1980s electro-pop that it should arrive with a free ra-ra skirt and mullet wig. It's a loving, glossy homage to the era of Duran and the Human League that resembles nothing so much as a Guilty Pleasures compilation of New Romantic hits that inexplicably passed you by the first time around.
Luckily, there is irony and humour in their poised pastiche. Opener Fantastic 6 recalls the forced zaniness of the B-52's, while 10,000 Nights channels Wham! if George Michael had been in the habit of beginning songs by crooning "I was not looking for arty-farty love." On Boyfriend, Stine Bramsen's plucky helium-like vocal could be Madonna circa Holiday or Borderline, while Rubber Boots suggests the Pet Shop Boys hymning the delights of wellies. But it peters out towards the end, and if you gorge yourself on this sugar rush of an album, you may feel decidedly sickly afterwards.
More to try: Human League: Dare Wham!: Fantastic Roxette: Joyride
