A Flock of Seagulls – Some Dreams Review

Every artist with a strong enough cultural presence will have landmark moments. Cornerstone associations for A Flock of Seagulls differ from generation to generation. The synth-pop fires of the 1980s are long-extinguished. For the world following Y2K fears, the cigarette-smelling second-hand records and Atomic Blonde are about as close as we can get to replicating the joy of a popular outfit like A Flock of Seagulls. Their new album, Some Dreams, settles them into a consistent lack of good form. Judge the album by its cover as we do the book. Care taken for those first impressions is major. Some Dreams looks like the scribbles of a band obsessed with new variations of tech but with no clue how to adapt it into their creative process. Corners are cut and even with the band returning to a well of original ideas for the first time in thirty years, it still feels like they are a pale imitation of what they were.  

Laughable lyrics for the title track say it all, or nothing, rather. Some Dreams is a discussion not of the powerful images we are given while we sleep but a snooze-inducing comment on what emotions we feel when we rest. Crying, laughing, the book of synonyms could be of real help to Mike Score here. Repetitive and seemingly endless, those promises of never forgetting to settle as immediately ironic given how forgettable this latest collection of songs is. A Flock of Seagulls are still trying to keep the bouncy energies of their previous releases but failed to factor in the inevitable, slower shift which affects legacy acts. Their failure to maintain a cultural punch immediately after I Ran is the killer here. Some Dreams’ disastrous, ineffective love songs sound like a pastiche of what the band once sang of. But it is no surprise when they are steadfast in trying to replicate it – whether listeners like it or not.  

Painful these realisations may be for the more committed fan, there is enough here for those dedicated few. Some Dreams is put through the grinder. From attempted Icarus exploitation on Castles in the Sky to uneventful jealousy put to tape on Him, A Flock of Seagulls is nowhere close to anything of interest. Repetitive and plain lyrics like this are either because a listener’s focus should be on the instrumental sections or because the writer is out of juice. Both occur here. We are left with a scattershot mix of those lazy synth additions and an acoustic route which yanks at your heartstrings. But there is no point tugging at those internal organs if, after gaining our attention, the lyrics consist of such flabby and generic metaphors of walking on the moon, and then not being able to walk on the moon.  

Mindless is the right word for it. Not a singular redeeming quality to it because of how lazy it feels. How underwhelming this project is should, perhaps, not be a surprise. But A Flock of Seagulls cannot even muster the courage or interest in their work to bait the nostalgic faithful. An album for people who say new music is rubbish. For those who put a space between each exclamation mark as they write of their rage and how Score is a genius of the keyboards. That may be the case. He hides such advancements well on Some Dreams, an album which sounds like the sort of Casio preset schoolkids muck around with when left unattended by a washed-up music teacher, trawling the internet for first print runs of The Light at the End of the World. A tiring, uneventful album which highlights how a lack of artistic evolution over thirty years can be a real detriment, to fans and artists alike.