Information Society
The earliest incarnation of this Minnesota band of tech-geeks was essentially a rock band with a deep love for club music, and their first widely distributed record splits the difference. The hit "What's on Your Mind (Pure Energy)," featuring a Leonard Nimoy sample, is essentially the great lost Duran Duran single, but the rest of the album is pleasingly all over the place. "Walking Away" owes as much to Latin freestyle as it does to mainstream dance-rock, "Lay All Your Love on Me" lights a fire under Abba's tailbone, and the last few tracks slow the tempo way down to an electro crawl. The album is inconsistent and fillery, but it demonstrates a bunch of routes dance music might have gone in the late '80s and didn't quite.--Douglas Wolk