Raise The Pressure [2LP] Vinyl

Raise the Pressure is Electronic's second album, and it recruits a former Kraftwerk member to push Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner's supergroup somewhere colder and more mechanical.

Marr and Sumner had already proven the concept worked on their 1991 debut, guitar hooks built for The Smiths colliding with dance production honed in New Order, but this 1996 follow-up brings in Karl Bartos, who co-wrote six of the album's thirteen tracks, and his fingerprints are unmistakable, rigid electronic pulse standing in sharper contrast against Marr's melodic instincts than anything on the first record attempted. It's a stranger, less immediately accessible album than the debut, and better for it, two guitar-scene legends genuinely stretching rather than repeating a formula that already worked.

Forbidden City opens the record with the Bartos influence at its most audible, motorik rhythm holding steady while Sumner's vocal floats somewhere detached above it. For You carries the album's clearest pop hook, Marr's guitar cutting through the electronics with real warmth. Second Nature closes out the singles run with a slower, more reflective take on the same tension between machine and melody that defines the whole record.

Three legendary careers colliding, and none of them softening the others. Raise the Pressure is where that collision got genuinely interesting.

Tracklist

LP 1 - Side A

1. Forbidden city
2. For you
3. Dark angel
4. One day

LP 1 - Side B

1. Until the end of time
2. Second nature
3. If you've got love

LP 2 - Side C

1. Out of my league
2. Interlude
3. Freefall

LP 2 - Side D

1. Visit me
2. How long
3. Time can tell