The Human League - Octopus [1995] torrent

Review by William Ruhlmann
The Human League hadn't learned any new tricks in the four-plus years it took to craft another one of their synth-pop collections. The best track was the most unusual, when Philip Oakey took a backseat and let one of his fellow vocalists -- probably Joanne Catherall, though her singing is interchangeable with Susanne Sulley's -- handle a delicately arranged love song, "One Man in My Heart." But more typical was the song that followed it, "Words," in which Oakey whined at considerable length about undetailed wrongs done to him in childhood. Even with a good dance beat, such stuff was hard to stomach, and most of the blips and blats that filled up the tracks had been used to better purpose on earlier recordings. (3/5)