Strange Disciple

Album review

Nation of Language's 2020 debut album, Introduction, Presence, aligned perfectly with an origin story that had founder Ian Devaney inspired to fashion the band's icy, driving synth pop after revisiting early-period Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark track "Electricity" for the first time since he was a kid. By the time he and bandmates recorded their second album, 2021's A Way Forward, they'd added touches of experimental electronic and Krautrock influences to their catchy, subterranean club songs. With third album Strange Disciple, they open up their sound just a bit further with the occasional inclusion of live instruments, specifically drums and guitar, without ever coming close to forsaking their turn-of-the-'80s roots. Featuring the lineup of Devaney, spouse Aidan Noell, and newcomer Alex MacKay (Mogwai, CHAI), along with returning producer Nick Millhiser, Strange Disciple finds their songwriting -- never a weakness for the group -- in even more consistent form. It opens with the spacious, haunting "Weak in Your Light," a song whose warbly bass and desperate vocals ("I'm in love…/Beleaguered and overdrawn/I can feel myself come undone") produce nearly all motion. While tempos vary throughout the set, infectious thumping and metallic beats then settle in by the intro to track two and never dissipate. That song, the similarly themed "Sole Obsession," populates dank atmospheres with trebly 16th-note synth patterns that reinforce a robotic bass-snare-bass-snare anti-cadence alongside pulsing low tones and echoing, trashcan-lid-like percussive accents. Meanwhile, Devaney, whose deep but limber vocal delivery falls in the vicinity of new wave icons like Phil Oakley, Dave Gahan, and Men Without Hats' Ivan Doroschuk, issues frustrated lines like, "Empty idol, strange disciple" and "To only seek and never find." Although loaded with bloopy, melancholy Minimoog jams, the album's more tuneful highlights include the elegant "Spare Me the Decision" and more Devo-esque "Too Much Enough," while tracks like "Swimming in the Shallow Sea" and the racing "Stumbling Still" incorporate shoegazey shimmer, at least at the surface level. That said, Nation of Language adhere strictly to a core timbral palette and, at least so far, always sound like themselves. Despite its anxious closing words, "I will never learn," fans of the band's prior releases are almost guaranteed to embrace Strange Disciple, and it's an excellent entry point for the uninitiated.
© Marcy Donelson /TiVo