(Telstar Records/Warner Music)

From Kraftwerk to New Order and through the realms of electro and synth pop, the music is something we have all heard before but not in the same way. Monotone lyrics and melodic darkness set the tone for a futuristic journey down memory lane.

The CD opens with a raw synthesizer tone and a pretty chunky electro break, which soon transforms into a mass of monosynths and filtered spoken word, it’s spacey and haunting but it sounds like it was made 20 years ago. Ladytron aren’t afraid to express what they want to achieve with their music, band founder Daniel Hunt stated in an interview that the influences from the 80’s are what they want to revive and turn into futuristic pop. On first listen this statement is evident although not every track hit the mark for me. Some of the tracks seem a little too sparse and flat to really catch my listening ear while others grabbed my attention immediately and had me listening closely to the elements of the music.

Ladytron have been around for sometime now, their first single, which got ‘single of the week’ in NME cost the group only 50 pounds to produce yet gave them their first taste of stardom. The band records most of the music by playing live and then mastering in a studio, although the actual tracks are usually written as songs before production. All 4 members play the keyboard so you can imagine the layers they can achieve with their sound, something that gives the album a raw quality. Most of the tracks have some sort of lyrical content, which works well with the music; the use of vocoders and pitch filters gives the illusion of the voice being part of the music rather than someone singing along.

Lately the group have emerged with two singles, the first ‘Seventeen’, is an electro influenced synth pop piece that I find extremely repetitive and somewhat annoying while ‘Light & Magic’ is a lush soundscape of spacey synths and pleasing melodies, a theme that really helps the CD flow. Although there is a wealth of talent within the group it is sometimes hard to take their sound seriously, the kitsch elements of the tracks take things a little too far at points and it all starts to sound a little like an ironic joke. In saying that the album does make for a good listen and I’ve enjoyed the sound of Ladytron. Overall the music is all eighties with added production to take the sound that one step further, sometimes it doesn’t work that well, other times it’s brilliant.