Lost by Camouflage

While I actually have all of the Camouflage albums (and a fair number of the singles and remixes) kicking around somewhere, I don't even have a vinyl player anymore, and I don't have them "at hand" where I can locate them without a substantive effort to figure out where they are. You don't need to anymore, of course, because you can play pretty much their entire body of work on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcc7ZHFTKUW4lbGP_f24bNQ

I'm in the middle of a playthrough of their entire body of "main" studio albums, with a handful of singles and remixes thrown in, although not the focus, in order, starting with their first album, Voices & Images and ending with their most recent (although now no longer so recent) Greyscale. They really are a good band. In fact, although I've never had the same emotional attachment to them that I had to Depeche Mode, or in some regards, even to De/Vision, most of their work is better than anything Depeche Mode has done in at least twenty years, and at least as good, if not better, than most of De/Visions. Although I've got to give De/Vision credit for having enough sheer volume that their number of good tracks is probably higher. Camouflage have had eight studio albums, and two Greatest Hits compilations, spread out from the late 80s until now. So, in other words, more than thirty years. 

Part of the reason that I don't have as much of an emotional attachment is that while I really liked Voices & Images, it did struggle in some ways because of the execrable English to make me take it quite as seriously as I'd have liked to. Later, their Methods of Silence album was somewhat more mediocre, without any tracks that stood out as prominently as "The Great Commandment" did ("Love Is a Shield" I know for sure I had on 12" vinyl, and probably still do in a box in my basement, but it simply wasn't as good of a song, and the remixes didn't grab me either.) Meanwhile was even worse, with really only one song that I (admittedly) really love a lot: "Heaven (I Want You)" and a bunch of other completely forgettable tracks. The next two albums either came out while I was out of the country not really listening to music, or they didn't have US releases and I didn't hear them until long after the fact. 2003's Sensor brought me back into the fold. It didn't have a US release either, but getting import CDs in 2003 was quite a bit easier than it had been in the 80s and 90s. Sensor is, in fact, such a great album that I think it might have a shot at being among the very best synthpop albums I've heard since 2000, even now (although I admit the scene has become large, indie and fragmented enough that I hardly hear everything that comes out anymore.) It's gloriously dark and sensual, in much the same way that Depeche Mode's work was at their peak, although a bit more "fuzzy" and grimy sounding. Track #6, "Lost" is one of my personal favorite songs from anyone ever, actually—highly recommended.

I haven't posted anything on this blog in a long time, and when I last did I was really diving into early hardstyle and hard trance. I still like those genres quite a bit, of course, but my older, more pure and deep love of darker synthpop has kind of taken over more again. It's time I posted an homage to the kinds of songs that I started this blog to talk about in the first place. 

Meanwhile (no pun intended) I'm struggling to get through my chronological listen-through right now, in the latter half of Meanwhile. It's not exactly painful, but it is certainly forgettable. 

Pompeji by Camouflage

I mentioned earlier that Camouflage's "Pompeji" was almost a better example of their melancholy, ethereal take on the Depeche Mode sound, in spite of the fact that it was really just an instrumental b-side. I also mentioned that I couldn't find any versions of the longer 12" version that I had on my "The Great Commandment" 12" single. That is no longer true, so here it is.

I like that this fan-made video has a bunch of images of the Serengeti on it. Although Pompeji is the German spelling of Pompeii, and therefore presumably this has an ancient Roman type theme or something like that, it always reminded me sharply of the opening credits to the movie Hatari! by Henry Mancini. Just for fun, I attached a youtube clip of that, too.

It helps, perhaps, that Hatari! is one of my favorite movies.

The Great Commandment by Camouflage

I've said earlier that Depeche Mode had greater success in the mid-80s on Continental Europe than they did in either the UK or the US. In the English speaking world, they had some dance club favorites, and "People Are People" had been a successful single, but otherwise Depeche Mode's commercial success was on slowburn... it took a long haul of putting out modestly successful singles and dance hall favorites like "Strangelove" or "Behind the Wheel" before they had the incredible sold out Rose Bowl concert in 1988 and the massively commercially successful Violater singles of late 1989 and 1990 kicked out.

I also mentioned that at about this time, and number of modestly successful bands started imitating Depeche Mode, so it's not surprising that one of the earliest and more successful such act was from Germany. In 1988, the trio's "The Great Commandment" spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard dance chart, and made an appearance just better than #60 on the Hot 100 pop chart. Camouflage had some other minor hits in 1989, including "Love Is A Shield" which was very much in the same vein, before changing their sound to a less synthpop oriented approach in the early 90s, and losing much of their audience in their home country as a result. Of course, their synthpop audience in the US and UK were lost at about the same time, because synthpop became unpalatable to those audiences.

Camouflage did have a unique take on the Depeche Mode sound; although you can't tell necessarily from this track, they did cultivate an unusual, dream-like, melancholy atmosphere that was very different from Depeche Mode's more straightforward dark and depressing sound. The B-side from "The Great Commandment" which is the instrumental album track "Pompeji" showcases this a fair amount. Sadly, I no longer have a vinyl player, so I can only listen to the shortened album version of that song rather than the nearly twice as long extended version that came on my 12" single for "The Great Commandment." Hopefully, one of these days when I get a machine that will play or convert those vinyls, my old vinyl will still actually play. I haven't been able to find anywhere where that song's been uploaded in youtube or anywhere else, except in the shorter album version.

In recent years, Camouflage have had some success, at least in Germany, by returning to their roots and recording stuff that sounds like dark synthpop. They re-released "The Great Commandment" with new, re-recorded vocals and instrumentation, and their 2003 album Sensor is a thing of dark, raw beauty. Their 2006 album Relocated isn't bad either, although not as good as Sensor. They've certainly improved their sound over the years, including their vocals. On their first release, Voices & Images (from which "The Great Commandment" comes) the German accent was often quite strong, and their lyrics were occasionally klunky and awkward as non-native English speakers will occassionally do. Subsequently, they cleaned that up a fair amount.