ABC, The Lexicon Of Love II, album review

Download this: Confessions Of A Fool; Flames Of Desire; Viva Love

Martin Fry gamely tries to emulate former glories but he is unable to climb the mountain

It’s always a tricky business, trying to resurrect the sound and spirit of the past, and as these two contrasting efforts show, fastidious craft can lose out to the casually artless approach.

Now pruned to just Martin Fry – albeit with Anne Dudley ladling string arrangements over everything – ABC have deliberately chosen to invoke the memory of their most fondly regarded album The Lexicon of Love, though Fry contends it reflects the more mature attitudes accumulated in the 30-odd intervening years.

Hence the “Confessions Of A Fool” which gives the project its best moment, a mea culpa over youthful indiscretions and machinations aptly set to a fatalistic descending chord structure.

Elsewhere, “Flames Of Desire” plays cleverly with references to Rome, the Tiber and legions en route to its chorus “You came, you saw, you conquered me”, while “Viva Love” gamely strives to emulate former glories, despite lacking the strong hook of a “Look Of Love” or “When Smokey Sings”.

But too many of these tracks are slight ideas and punning phrasework over-egged into grotesque wedding-cakes by Dudley’s billowing strings, leaving Fry stranded in the position summarised in “Brighter Than The Sun”: “I’m a man out of time/Looking for a mountain to climb”.