There’s a fine line between disaffection and disposability and The Emergency have trouble walking it. A pastiche of a pastiche, Dreams That Money Can Buy rides high on a recent moment in the fickle electro trend cycle, the already-fading trend for recycled Italo Disco sounds. Moroder-esque synths, post-disco beats and super clean robo-funk lines, all with a slightly dystopic, disengaged ambience – this album’s got ‘em in spades. Check the box under vintage synths and monochromatic keys too.

While the palette is there, The Emergency misrecognise the most redeeming aspect of the genre’s recent reinterpretation, that special evocation of a vague urban paranoia that seemed like it was as much in the recent past as it was the near future. They misunderstand this alienation as just aliens, opting for hackneyed cosmic disco themes: stars exploding, the vastness of space-time, space travel as a possible metaphor for drug trips ... OK, we get it. Take, ‘Forever’, an otherwise great track, let down by terrible lines such as, “Time keeps on going forever/Forever is such a long time.” Whether the irony is intended or not, it’s a lyric that’s just a little too close to home considering the other major drag of this album, its suffocating monotony.

It was probably something of a challenge the duo set themselves to use or at least sound like old-school machines, but this limited sonic range coupled with the cold, brooding sheen of it all only makes for an album that’s disappointingly monochromatic. Vocally too, Milo Kossowski’s stoned baritone simply doesn’t have enough texture to carry every track in the exact same tonal register. Something that’s clearly worked over to sound brooding and stoic can just as easily come off as heavy and dull – and it’s not helped by the overlong running time.

Perhaps if they had cut out the filler and thought more about dynamic than mood, Dreams That Money Can Buy would be a more enjoyable listen. As it stands, it’s the aural equivalent of a relayed dream: “So, like, I was me but not me, kind of me younger, and there was a monkey in there, and then I was standing on a cliff, then I was in space, and it just went on forever...”

by Lawson Fletcher