- Record Label: 100% Records
- Release Date: Sep 1, 2017
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Aug 31, 2017In the wrong hands, this kind of thing could come across as heavy-handed or detached, but The Punishment Of Luxury exudes warmth and empathy throughout.
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Sep 6, 2017Like all of OMD’s post-reunion releases, The Punishment of Luxury sounds too clean, too digital for its own good. There’s too little of the analog muskiness that made their early work so haunting. Drummer Malcolm Holmes, forced to retire for health reasons, is sorely missed. Nonetheless, even if OMD’s message is an old one, it is one they can still deliver quite well.
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Sep 5, 2017Now there is an extra dimension, an extra frisson, for like their contemporaries this year (Erasure, Depeche Mode) OMD are bringing some raw feeling to the studio.
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Aug 31, 2017It may be a little old-fashioned in places and there's the occasional track that doesn't work 100-percent, but the album is another strong showing from a band that could have packed it in years ago and become a nostalgia act, but have instead continued to make fine pop art.
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UncutAug 29, 2017It's refreshing to hear Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey challenging themselves as OMD enjoy their Indian Summer--"La Mitrailleuse" blends gunfire and military drums--even if the results mostly end up as blue-eyed Kraftwerkian pop. [Oct 2017, p.36]
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Aug 29, 2017Fans of their two albums, 2010's History Of Modern and 2013's English Electric, will not be disappointed. [Jul - Sep 2017, p.59]
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Sep 14, 2017The only track that leaves you electronically cold is Robot Man, which sounds like OMD by numbers. Saying that, nice to also hear them lashing some decent beats beneath the engine of The Punishment Of Luxury.
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Sep 1, 2017The Punishment of Luxury continues the band's ongoing reunion without significantly altering their course. A few songs here could end up in the band's permanent setlist, but for an album so concerned with our present-day living, OMD seem too content to linger in their own past.
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MojoAug 29, 2017Classic OMD tropes are almost overdone on this, their 13th studio album. [Oct 2017, p.88]
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Aug 29, 2017In 1983, OMD threatened to derail their career with the defiantly leftfield Dazzle Ships. A sense of that adventurous spirit permeates this 12-track collection but Andy and Paul’s flair for infectious melody actually steers this comfortably away from the chillier extremes of that earlier well-regarded but commercially-limited opus.