When a rising style of music is characterized as futuristic, is someone continuing to make that music, long after it has been absorbed into the mainstream, a futurist or a revivalist? With This Is The Last Generation, and I Love You All, Jackson, Wisconsin’s Bradley Bohringer, using only his first moniker for his nom de disc, is a few albums into making electronic pop of a sort that knows little of house, rave and any synthetic style postdating the 1980s. With a voice recalling both the warmth and aloofness of The Human League’s Philip Oakey and keyboard programming of that vintage, Bradley’s work could pass as a lost obscurity from the Reagan years. Yet, if darkly nostalgic, he’s also a bit hopeful, doubtless from the Christianity obliquely referenced on many of Last Generation’s tracks. As with his other work in ’80s cover band The First Wave, Bradley is concerned with getting bodies moving, but he leaves room for chilling out, too. Maybe he knows a bit more about raving than he first lets on?
