The Departure come out of the shadows (though shadows are admittedly few and far between these days with the industry’s spotlights staking out post-punk’s darkest corners) with much the same confidence as The Killers did back when nobody was offering them chart placings or Glasto headline slots on a plate. Minimum fuss, a modest twist of competence, an inability to dress themselves but possessing the good fortune of having the decade their influences call home as tailor. These songs have style, sharp threads, smooth moves, but you feel more through association than design by the band themselves. The problem is possibly how closely these songs fit the era we’re in like a glove without doing anything further to define or justify themselves. They don’t really put a foot wrong, but then is that because they wouldn’t dare?
When Franz Ferdinand, Maximo Park, The Futureheads et al have already cut arty shapes to mark their territory, and The Killers and The Bravery stepped in and laid earlier claims if nothing else, a band like The Departure stepping in at this point with sturdy but unremarkable repertoire, seem to stand little chance of leaving much residue on the era. There is little here to interpret as arty in fact, unless you can count over-singing as such. This is smooth, comfortable 80s pop, cut to size like a length of fabric in a warehouse. It’s dapper like Spandau Ballet, and whichever way you look at things, that just isn’t exciting. They’re like Interpol not suffocated by gravity, and Interpol are everything because of the drama they create, rather than just the records they own.
It seems strange that the overwhelming impression we’re left with is one of complacency and convenience when we can hear the early, sharp, hungry beats of U2 pulling along the posturing of Duran Duran on the dense, dark ‘Talkshow’, a brooding Gang Of Four ambience soaking through ‘All Mapped Out’ and ‘Be My Enemy’ and the angry, believing tones of Jam period Paul Weller bashing their authority with mild but unspecific colloquialism on ‘Only Human’ and others. But though the mixture is heady, it tends to hang stagnant. There is a good album beneath the surface, but it doesn’t care to protrude and make itself known.
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