It’s hard to know where to put Miracle. The self-described “boy band” are on Planet Mu, one of electronic music’s more experimental “big” labels. Steve Moore, the American behind the album’s lush bed of electronics, is a synth wizard known for his droning epics, lush dance tracks, and italo-aping band Zombi. UK singer Daniel O’Sullivan, meanwhile, has worked with any number of left-field rock outfits from Sunn O))) to Guapo (the band he fronts). Together, they make creeping synth pop that feels like Depeche Mode steeped in the fog of the Misty Mountains—there’s nothing really experimental, dance, or rock about it at all. It’s moody and serious stuff, evident from the outset with “Good Love”, where arpeggios snake at a glacial pace as O’Sullivan bellows about the “most high, all-powerful good love” with all the pomp and circumstance of a late 70s fantasy metal epic.
If it wasn’t obvious from that, there’s something else running underneath Mercury than the facile synth-pop revivalist label that others will lobby at it. Let’s get this out of the way: O’Sullivan has a pleasing, resolutely British voice that recalls a higher-register Dave Gahan—he’s a dead ringer on “Something Is Wrong”, which has an existential-dread chorus (“Something is wrong/ I don’t know what it means to be in love”) that would be a long lost Black Celebration cut*.* But most of the time, O’Sullivan is his own artist in spite of superficial semblances, and his arch phrasing is more goth-inflected folk than fey synth-pop posturing. There’s also a certain muscular chug to these tracks that you wouldn’t necessarily get from mid-80s Sire Records—a propulsive crawl learned from Moore’s dance records and his work in Zombi.
Those synths? They make the record, which is important, because Mercury is all synths—no guitars or anything that sounds close to a band here. It's a beautifully-produced record, with such a grasp on its machines that it doesn’t even need straight drums—the title track is a buzzing collection of cogs and whirling machinery, woodpecker woodblocks, and other strange percussive devices driving it forward in the place of lumpen drum machines. Moore’s unique sensibilities can jar with O’Sullivan’s pop ambitions as much as they elevate them, however. On “Neverending Arc”, a walk-in freezer of horror synths and creepy arpeggios, O’Sullivans leaden melody lines slide right off Moore’s icy walls, and the grand power ballad “Breathless” doesn’t have a grandiose hook to match its “Take My Breath Away” bombast.
The album’s final passage offers up a glimpse at an alternate mode for the duo. Penultimate track “Wild Nights” is a windswept series of arpeggios that feels like psychedelic-era Beatles as imagined by William Orbit, and the perpetual krautrock groove is carried over into 10-minute closer “Organon”. Here, one of Moore’s characteristic long-form swirls is given over to eerie chanting by O’Sullivan, indulging in the eerie English folk tradition that he hints at elsewhere.
While it’s easy enough to imagine how wonderful an LP made up entirely of these yawning ambient tracks would be, that’s not entirely fair to Moore and O’Sullivan. Mercury feels like an addition to the canon of 80s synth pop albums rather than an attempt to xerox them, mainly because of its sincerity—there’s no sly winking or irony here, period. That it such a record would come on Planet Mu and be produced by these two particular artists is a strange story indeed, but the music speaks for itself—anyone who fancies long lost synth-pop obscurities would probably find at least a few songs to like on Mercury.
