I ALWAYS find the term “80s music” when used as a label a bit of an odd concept. After all how the hell can a decade also be a genre?

Sadly that decade, the one that honed my own musical tastes, has become a bit of a by-word for cheesy, Day-Glo dross and throwaway bubble-gum pop, which is a real shame as it was also an era of immense creativity and of the birth of whole new genres, the perfect second chapter to follow the punks’ year zero.

The band obviously have a deep love of the music of that era and whilst their brand of synth-pop sometimes sails a bit close to the most accessible end of the spectrum I have just described, as always, the devil is in the detail.

The slick trappings of the more commercial end of New Romanticism as it merged into the new pop beats at the music’s heart and very often they are content just to revisit that ground.

And why not? They do it so well and tracks such as Sylvia’s Voyage and Dreaming With Monsters could easily be lost recordings by any one of those 80s stalwarts who went on to rule the roost.

On the other hand, songs such as For The Better Worth are as fresh a piece of modern club floor-filler as you could wish for and The Miracle of Cult could almost be The Bee Gees remixed by the newest kid on the alternative dance block.

Opening salvo 9 Hours 23 Minutes is nothing less than a cutting edge, headlong euphoric rush into the future of dance music.

Siblings Of Us are a classic example of the cyclical nature of music, able to reference the formative years of synth driven tune-making, but rather than sit on their retro laurels, they blend it deftly with the sounds of now, matching the familiarity and reassurances of what has gone before with the excitement and creativity of pushing the generic boundaries forward into an bright, interesting and yet unwritten future. - Dave Franklin