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However, for the faithful, like me, the popularity of synthpop is immaterial: the quality of the music is what I'm interested in. In this regard, I have good news and bad news both about Liberator. First off, there are a number of good songs, and the quality is close to that of Sugar Tax. However, if the last album was already starting to sound samey, then another album of the same sound... well, I'm sure you get the drift. The first song, "Stand Above Me" has a beat much like that of "Sailing the Seven Seas" for instance. It's a good song, although it's obvious that it's trying to be almost a remake. After that, we have "Everyday" which isn't really a bad song, although it's a tad boring. It's got an almost dancey beat, and some jazzy sounds here and there. Reminds me a lot of half the songs on Sugar Tax. "King of Stone" is a bit slower, but suffers from the exact same problem -- sounds much too much like "Then You Turn Away" or "Big Town." OMD was good at slow songs once upon a time, but these are just boring. At least on Sugar Tax we have the excellent "All That Glitters" to make up for the boring ones. Liberator has no such equivalent. The next song is probably the best one on the CD: "Dollar Girl." However, even though it's a good song, it sounds an awful lot like "Speed of Light" or "Call My Name." After hearing an entire album of music that was already too similar, hearing another one doesn't do much for me, even if some of the songs, like this one, are the same quality. I also like the next song better than most. Sadly, it's not an OMD original. "Dream of Me (Based on 'Love Theme')" is a delicate, gorgeous sweeping, dreamy, slower song. It's also a cover song. The song also features some female backing vocals, which actually appear subdued throughout many of the songs here, a new thing for OMD. "Sunday Morning" is another attempt to make a classic OMD slow song. It falls somewhat flat again. It sounds OK, and Andy surely knows what he's doing technically, but the song seems to lack heart for some reason. To give him credit, he sings in a slightly different style, like he's trying just a little to break away from the europop label he'd always been stuck with. There's actually an interview with pre-split OMD where they admit that they are often called Europop, and kinda resented being labeled. Perhaps that also accounts for the subtle change here -- the slightly jazzy, "American-style" vocal delivery and the occasional guitar, and the female backing vocals again. If so, the next album Universal was the real kicker, moving in a completely different direction from Sugar Tax, Liberator and the OMD sound in general. The next song is an instrumental "Agnus Dei". Much like "Apollo XI" it features a fairly strong beat. It seems to really fit into the album well, with female wordless vocals here and there, and flighty sounds that fit with the other songs well. Of course, that also means it could have fit seamlessly on Sugar Tax but I've already been over that, haven't I? This song is followed by another "early 90s OMD dance song" that fits the formula very well. "Love and Hate You" features Andy trying to sound "sassy" on the vocals, but it's not enough to really make it sound very different. It's competent, but starting to get tiring already. Unfortunately, the next song is another very much like it: "Heaven Is." The most intriguing aspect at this point is listening to the lyrics, which are kinda curious, at least. Sadly, if this repeat of the same formula sounds tiring, it's also actually the high point of the album. After this, the album actually gets even more boring. "Best Years of Our Lives" isn't much different from the slower grouping of songs that we already know so well by this point. Like most of the album, there's nothing really wrong with it -- it's just that we've heard it all before many times. The most interesting thing about "Christine" is the odd lyrics that don't seem to fit the song at all, unless you find the strange synthline that perennially sounds out of tune interesting. Finally we come to "Only Tears" which sounds eerily like it almost could have been "Christine" again at times. It has the same beat, most of the same sounds and a similar feel.
Looking at the album overall, it's hard, again, to say what went wrong. Perhaps if I had heard this one before I had heard Sugar Tax many, many times, it would have sounded better and the prior album would have sounded derivative. Surely, the fact that they are so similar hurts this one, in my estimation. However, I've tried to get past that and evaluate the songs without basing them too much on the other material Andy's done. Even here, I think the songs are of a slightly inferior quality overall. They are even more formulaic, if possible, than the songs on Sugar Tax with no truly unique or even slightly different songs. It almost feels, at times, as if Andy were kinda tired of making the songs and was putting this album together out of habit rather than because he really wanted to. To be fair, things could have been worse. The album is still pretty decent. However, especially for someone who has Sugar Tax it simply doesn't impress much.
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