A couple of weeks ago, I came to the alarming realization that I could, quite accidentally, become a devoted birdwatcher. This is our first spring in a new house in a new neighborhood - and by that I mean in a just-built house in a neighborhood that still only looks like a sketch of a neighborhood on those Google satellite pictures. It's one of those "traditional" neighborhoods, where the garages are in the back off an alley that runs behind the houses, and each house is separated by a sliver of lawn. Nobody has much in terms of a private yard (though, due to an accident in planning, we ended up with a side yard just large enough to be fenced off for the dogs), but the neighborhood compensates for this with a bounty of green space surrounding and marbling its densely packed subdivision. This subdivision is bounded on the south and west by a large marshy area, man-made drainage ponds, and the "restored" Koshkonong Creek. Beyond the marsh are large wooded hills - bright, delicate stands of paper birch and willow, and behind them, muscular crowds of oak.

On most mornings this spring, a soft, cottony fog has shrouded this view, giving it a dreamy, movie beautiful aura - even as the soundtrack to the view is often the grind and rumble and backing-up beep-beep-beeps of various construction trucks (we are a neighborhood under construction); but in the evening, when the trucks are gone, if the sun is out, the streets of our little sustainable (so much optimism in that word) village busify with couples walking their dogs, teenagers playing lacrosse (lacrosse!) in the unbuilt (for now) lots, people biking, people carrying big bags of gas station-bought cypress mulch up from their cars to the hopeful little kidney shaped gardens that hug their pillared porches, and people just walking, admiring the progress of the new YMCA that's going in, or speculating about when they're going to finish the sidewalks on O'Keeffe Avenue (won't that be nice?), or watching their kids climbing all over the playground equipment at the dubiously named Thoreau Park.

It was on one of these bustling Monday evenings a couple weeks ago, when I was sitting at a picnic table at Thoreau Park, trying hard not to choke on the irony as I contemplated the goings on of the park's man-made pond (what would Henry David think of this?), eventually settling into a nice zone of cozy vacancy - not really thinking about or looking at or looking for anything - when I heard, somewhere out among the ghostly pale, yellowed skeleton stalks of last year's cattails in the marsh, and then, even out in the trees beyond the marsh, there was a sound like the evolutionary mother of all ecstacy rave parties, the very specific croaking of frogs and toads nearby, as sharp and distinct as the clacking of castanets, the steady, creaking hum a million crickets chirping, and above and around it all: birds! Birds!

All sorts of birds, and all of them making their own noises, the haunted hoo-hooing of mourning doves and the excitable yip-yipping of cranes - like an outdoor stadium packed with people waiting for the lights to go down for the start of the show. And just as I was noticing the sound of them, wishing, on some level, that I could pick them all out and identify them, but also losing myself to the cacophonous chaos of it and feeling lucky to have chanced upon this frothy little ecosystemic soiree, I felt myself shadowed by the heretofore unfathomably low flight path of a crane making its way from one recently constructed pond to another. Geese, in pairs, too - so low I could almost read their expressions. And as a duck lifted its bulbous body into the air, frantically flapping its wings in a goofy, airborne doggy-paddle, I realized I'd never seen a duck fly before, and it made me laugh. Oh, the biodiversity!

To live in a neighborhood like this, you have to buy into a certain level of pretense, to learn to live with marketable catch words like "sustainable" and "traditional", to stifle your gag reflex while strolling streets with quaintly alliterative names like Sweet Sparrow and Fair Pheasant; you have to learn to like friendly, suburban, uniformly middle class people enough to always be seeing them - on the sidewalks, on their porches, trimming their tidy little slivers of lawn with their environmentally correct person-powered push mowers. I mean, yes, sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name, but do you want to live there? You have to suspend your sense of irony long enough to contemplate the goings-on of a flood-engineered pond and a restored creek as if these things were no less pure and natural than Walden Pond. You have to believe in the conceptual replica and trust that it will eventually deliver some kind of real transcendance: Home.

There's a record review here. I promise.

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In fact, on some level, I've already described both the sound and the prevailing themes of synth-pop duo Erasure's brilliant 1991 album Chorus. As the 80s turned into the 90s, singer Andy Bell and synth wizard Vince Clarke (formerly of Depeche Mode and Yaz) had reached a critical and commercial zenith with hit singles like "A Little Respect" and "Chains of Love", but appeared to be growing restless with their own successful formula - that being simple, catchy, defiantly unchallenging three-minute pop songs, played entirely on programmed keyboards, and sung with no small measure of soulful, ambiguously gay drama. That restlessness resulted in the appropriately titled Wild!, a scattershot, disorientingly varied record, which, though not without its charms, suggested a band in artistic crisis. To that point, Erasure had been a wildly prolific act, releasing an album a year, and a seemingly endless profusion of singles and EPs, but nearly two years passed between Wild! and Chorus, and the latter proved a thoughtful, considered, and beautifully sober foil to the amphetamine frenzy of the former.

A moody record that continually treads a line between celebration and contemplation, the prevailing sound of Chorus is spare and understated - despite the stomping, sweaty tank-top, arms-in-the-air disco excursion of the album's biggest single, "Love to Hate You", which boasts a melody and a recurring synthesizer chorus (not to mention an attitude of righteous dismissal) that Gloria Gaynor could've sued the boys over - and if it finds the duo drifting back into the realm of the catchy three-minute pop song, the songwriting nevertheless has a new sophistication to it, both emotional and sonic, that Erasure would continue to build upon, with varying degrees of success, over their next few albums. As Andy Bell sings in the chorus of "Siren Song", a gorgeous, baroque meditation on nature and mortality and stuff, replete with an Enya-style Andy Bell chorale, Chorus is a record about trying to "see the splendour of it all" and embracing "the honesty of nightfall."

Lyrically, this amounts to an album full of songs of life, death and actual, mature, romantic relationships, or at least the desire for them; or, as on the skittery, self-scolding "Perfect Stranger" - maybe I should grow up - the stupid mistakes people make on their way to those actual, mature relationships; or, as on the emphatically quiet "Am I Right?", the unvoiced doubts that haunt and thwart them. It's an album that seems to find a kind of beauty in all of these moments. "Perfect Stranger", for instance, gives us one of the album's most insidiously pleasurable melodies, and as Andy keeps his voice squarely in a more conversational lower register, the chorus, which sorta sneaks up on us, feels like a moment of friendly luncheon confidence. So that when he sings, "Still, more fool me for kidding myself," you know exactly what he's talking about because, girlfriend, you've been there.

And while, as a lyricist, Bell doesn't go to undue pains to be topical, a lot of these songs do work on personal and political levels. "Turns the Love to Anger" actually starts off as a prayer for peace - lest we forget the speed at which the world is turning - full of beautifully juxtaposed adjectives - we are lost in our vision, we are primitive and fearless - over spare, bubbling electronics; but just as the song moves from a collective first person we to a directive second person you, the tempo builds and the relative calm of the song gives way to a flustered, stomping gospel disco groove on the final verse and chorus - oh, you found it, baby, what you're lookin' for - the kind of kiss-off that means that you can't take it anymore, but let's find a way to stay together. It's one of my very favorite Erasure moments.

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But as wonderful as Andy Bell's lyrics and strong, disciplined singing are on this album, it's how Vince Clarke, along with producer Martin Phillipps, tailored the sound of the record to relate to the songs that really distinguishes Chorus as one of the group's finest two-thirds-of-an-hour. Most significantly, despite the fact that Erasure had always produced purely electronic music, Chorus is the first Erasure album to really embrace the "electronic-ness" of their chosen approach to music-making, and it's filled with all sorts of blips and bleeps and honks and squawks that are simultaneously musical and not; a seemingly infinite number of little computerized motifs that pop up repeatedly throughout the songs, hinting at melodies and harmonies without really committing to either, all interacting like a crowd of bird calls both with each other and with the greater song in a strangely wonderful, instantly familiar, but wholly artificial ecology of sound.

Like the perfectly constructed moments of personal interaction depicted in the pristine advertising images that fill the CD's booklet, the overall effect is a fake plastic replica of nature that's somehow natural and real in its own way - a sound that is both pastoral and urban, evoking the flashing blue video lights and silvery ice machine fogs of a dance club, as much as the blinding gold spectacle of a sunrise over a fog-shrouded marsh. The noisy fanfare that opens the title track could just as easily be a city siren as it could be the long, triumphant mid-summer buzzing of a locust; there are bloop-bloop-bloo-doops that sound like hoo-hooing of mourning doves, and urgent verses ornamented with garish la-la-la-la-la-ahs like the insistent yipping of cranes. The airy, imagistic contemplations of songs like "Siren Song" - ragged whispers of imprisoned sisters cutting through real life, drawing me nearer - hint at the glorious smallness of a single life in the midst of the glorious bigness of life itself - a feeling that translates directly to the alone-ness of an evening spent sitting at a picnic table next to a man-made pond in the inadvertent thrall of all the various birds' melodic patterns of flight, but also to the alone-ness of strolling down a city street in the shadows of skyscrapers.

And like an incoming cumulonimbus might have us rushing out into the parking lot to roll up our car's windows, only to pass us, rainlessly, by, the songs of Chorus constantly keep us guessing where they're headed, preparing for one thing only to hear another. The album's crowning moment is the closing "Home", Andy's very personal, very quiet celebration of how wonderful and transient his life has become - I'm never going home, cos I'm having a good time - living at the center of his own frothy, traveling, ecosystemic soiree. It boasts one of Erasure's mostly lovely melodies, and a chorus of florid triplets - time will come, time will come, time will fall - that, gently, hauntingly remind us of how temporary "the splendour of it all" is. It's a song that starts quietly and whose pastoral arrangement, full of glittery harp-sounds and distant snare beats and, incongruously, an unnervingly industrial alarm sound, gets larger and fuller as the song progresses so that we feel it may burst into one last rally of disco beats at any moment - until it ends. And then, the album's over.

Try to feel the splendour of it all
Embrace the honesty of nightfall
Try to feel the anguish of it all
Wrap yourself up in every facet of emotion

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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:

"Chorus" by Erasure
Mute-Sire-Reprise Records
Released 10/1991

Produced by Martin Phillipps
38 min.

SONGS: Chorus - Waiting for the Day - Joan - Breath of Life - Am I Right? - Love to Hate You - Turns the Love to Anger - Siren Song - Perfect Stranger - Home

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MORE ERASURE:

Union Street (2006)

Andy Bell - Electric Blue (2005)

Nightbird (2005)

Loveboat (2000)

Wild! (1989)

The Innocents (1988)

Recommended: Yes