It seems almost unreal that it’s been 29 years since The Psychedelic Furs last put out an album’s-worth of all new material. Perhaps that’s because the band has been almost ubiquitous over the past decade. After sitting out a big chunk of the ‘90s, the band reformed in the early aughts and have been touring every few years ever since – playing some of their best shows in their decades-long career. Or maybe it’s because a slew of younger bands took liberal amounts of inspiration from them and have managed to make careers out of sounding like The Psychedelic Furs. Regardless, for the first time since 1991’s The World Outside, the band has put out a new studio LP and Made of Rain is their best album since the seminal Talk, Talk, Talk in the early ‘80s.
Across a dozen tracks the band reaffirms why they were one of the most important post-punk British bands to conquer America (thanks in big part to John Hughes). From the opening track, “The Boy Who Invented Rock & Roll,” with Richard Butler’s emotionally-charged vocals competing over a scrum of distorted guitar, synth lines and squawking horns, it’s clear the band is not trying to reinvent themselves for a newer audience, rather they are simply reclaiming their status as musical innovators, pioneers of alternative rock, long before the genre had a name.
Made of Rain manages to be both vaguely nostalgic and groundbreaking at the same time. There are no obvious rewrites of their old songs here, but between Butler’s easily identifiable vocals – vacillating between anger and vulnerability – and the curiously heady mix of hard rock guitars alongside sax, the sound is still clearly built on the classic foundations of the band. Over the course of the past few years, a slew of influential bands from the 1980s – Echo & The Bunnymen, James, Jesus & Mary Chain and others – have gone back into the studio and come out with some of their best albums ever. It seems only fitting that The Psychedelic Furs would continue the trend.
