Originally released in 1983, Duet Emmo's Or So It Seems was one of the numerous projects pursued by Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis during Wire's hiatus in the early '80s. While preparing the third Dome album, the pair began working with Mute Records founder Daniel Miller, brains behind the Silicon Teens and also known as the Normal, whose single "T.V.O.D."/"Warm Leatherette" had been a foundational recording for electro-pop. In theory, Duet Emmo -- an anagrammatic combination of the names Dome and Mute -- promised to be an engaging hybrid of Gilbert and Lewis' abstract, minimal textures and Miller's rigid, song-based electronics. However, Or So It Seems didn't completely realize that potential and the album is less a seamless marriage of the collaborators' aesthetics than an awkward cohabitation of abstruse Dome material with more accessible and melodic synth-oriented fare. The Gilbert and Lewis half of the Duet Emmo equation occupies the bulk of the album. Throughout the muffled beat of "Hill of Men," the murky 17-minute "Long Sledge," the metal-machine interlude of "Friano," and the primitive industrial rhythms of "A.N.C.," it's largely Dome as usual: namely, an occasionally mesmerizing ambient remix of your central heating being repaired. Miller's pop sensibility contributes significantly to the album's strongest numbers, such as the title cut with its busy, pulsing rhythms, intermittent synth squelches, and austere melody. It also features an unprecedentedly emotive vocal performance by Graham Lewis, which anticipates the more mainstream, electronically based direction Lewis would take as He Said. Equally successful is "The First Person," its galloping beat and electronic swirl evoking the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Doctor Who theme. The trio's composite name suggested a blending of creative identities. Nevertheless, the fruit of this collaboration is a largely schizophrenic affair in which the Dome-flavored material accounts for the less compelling moments.
© Wilson Neate /TiVo
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