Simon Le Bon opens Duran Duran’s first album for too few years with a mock epic lament for “a world that is paper thin” — all headshots and online poseurs.
The Birmingham quartet clearly sense in 2015 a similar strain of New Romantic ennui to the one that enabled them to become the pre-eminent boyband of the early Thatcher years.
Nick Rhodes has compared himself to Kanye West — while the Daft Punk-scale list of collaborators (Janelle Monaé, Mark Ronson, Lindsay Lohan no less) suggests their influence outweighs their ideas.
But posterity has not smiled on Duran Duran as it has on their early Eighties peers. More hitmakers than songwriters, they fall here through overwrought couplets and a dearth of fresh melody.
Nile Rogers’s productions have a little zip, and at least Monaé injects a little passion — otherwise, it’s as boring as someone else’s comedown.
(Warner Bros)
