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"Electroclash" (taking its name from the annual festival held in NY, now in its second year) is a rather confused, marketing-driven conflation of early-'80s electro, which is basically urban dance music/hiphop, and synthpop, which is Euro-styled new wave rock. These two types of music had the barest of common ground back in the day. Arthur Baker produced "Planet Rock" and then worked with New Order; both types of music use synths and vocoders; that's about it. If electroclash was just DJ music it would go nowhere--it's the "new wave nostalgia" angle (i.e., marketing it to white people) that's selling it this time around. I really don't buy the crap from Electroclash's promoters that "these kids (going to EC parties) are too young to know about Kraftwerk, Nitzer Ebb, etc." It was the music their parents had playing around the house when they were tykes in the 80s. (Well, maybe not Nitzer Ebb.) I guess I'm one of those purists referred to in this Village Voice article. I'll take the Mantronix/Drexciya/Man Parrish/DJ Assault (forward-looking) strain of what i call "electro" over the kitsch-retro, Human-League-by-way-of-Fischerspooner strain any day. I see no reason to coin a term to combine the two genres in the absence of any true innovation. But I realize it's out of my hands.
Addendum: Simon Reynolds covers this subject with his usual compulsive thoroughness here. He thinks the main thing that distinguishes electroclash from electro is vocals, but then criticizes electroclash vocals as pretty thin overall. He also thinks the new music is technologically sprightlier, less plodding than '80s music, and I agree: "There’s a textured intricacy to the rhythm programming and production that testifies to the
technical advances of the last 15 years of digitized dance music, to lessons that can't be unlearned."