Album Review- VNV Nation- Electric Sky

Some of my favorite music came out in the mid 2000s. It seemed like such a creative era. As someone then entering their 30s, I think it’s probably typical to see newer bands as continuations of bands liked in the teen years or twenties. For example, I loved The Libertines, the Killers, the Strokes, Franz Ferdinand and others who were clearly born from influences like the Smiths, Clash, the Jam, the Cure and so on. There also was a movement at the same time that from a big picture point of view could be classified as “dark wave” (I have also heard “future pop”) which in my mind kind of starts with Depeche Mode and 80s synth pop and slowly added more modern elements like the techno industrial of Frontline Assembly, the hard goth rock of Sisters of Mercy, the rave elements of the Prodigy and them you can hear melodic pop elements and soundtrack elements and even maybe reaching back to an earlier lineage of artists like Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk To me, the stretch of six albums from 1999s Empires all the way to 2011s Automatic is their golden era. At various points, it sounded like the band was done, though looking back, they never seemed to sit idle. Like their spiritual predecessor A Clan of Xymox, they have a lot of attributes in the fact of being incredibly prolific in a narrow genre. This means new albums can have a sense of repetition. Like Xymox, VNV Nation is now largely the work of one man (Ronan Harris with the departure of percussionist/drummer/keyboardist Mark Jackson in 2017). 11 albums in, there is, pardon the pun, nothing new under the sun, and I would still recommend new listeners to those earlier records but Electric Sun is their best album in at least a decade.