When I think of Erasure's 1988 album,The Innocents I remind myself of Samantha Baker's older sister in the movie Sixteen Candles. The part where she's in her bedroom, wearing nothing but a slip, looking at herself in the mirror, and, while Samantha listens on, losing herself in a reverie to her 'oily variety bohunk' fiancee, saying something like "Well, I've been in love with lots of boys, but never for six months straight." So it is with The Innocents.
You see, I'd like to say that there are very few albums out there that I know forwards and backwards, that I know every word of, that I know every little guitar solo, musical tweak, and drum fill to, that I invariably make myself hoarse singing along with - I'd like to be able to say that there are very few albums that can fill me with that kind of wanton joy. But it's not so. In truth, my affection for music is kinda slutty and indiscriminate (a point recently made clear to me once again by an incredulous comment left by a fellow Epinionator on my 4 star review of the Revolting Cocks' new disc.) Put bluntly, I've been in love with lots of albums. But never for 18 years straight.
It would be too easy at this point to attribute the appeal of The Innocents to your garden-variety nostalgia. It came out six years before my son was born. I was 15 when I first heard it. MTV still played music (and it was on their show 120 Minutes I first heard the album's lead single "Chains of Love") and Ronald Reagan was still president, for Pete's sake. (And wasn't he just the greatest?) But I'll tell you. There are some albums that we fall in love with as teenagers, and then we get to college and it's sort of a joke that we ever listened to them, and then we grow up and have kids and their music (not to mention their deplorable lack of a sense of musical history) scares the bejesus out of us, and we long for simpler times, and suddenly that album that we fell in love with as a 15-year-old suddenly sounds good again.
That's not how it's been with The Innocents. I remember the night I fell in love with The Innocents. It was the night I bought it. It was also the night of our second performance of my sophomore year high school play, an adaptation of a Twilight Zone episode called Whodunit? in which I was playing Michael The Archangel. And it was love at first sound. "A Little Respect" hadn't yet been released as a single, but it sounded like a classic immediately:
The bouncy synthesized guitar part, and that roller-coaster melody whirling up into the clouds and swooping down to the bottom of singer Andy Bell's range, the stuttering thatchagimmeno-thatchagimmeno-thatchagimmeno-thatchagimmeno revving up to the soaring sooooooooooooul of the chorus - I hear you caaaaaalling - and the climbing, climbing, climbing inexorably back up to the greatest falsetto hook in the history of mankind. (Well, the second greatest, next to Morten Harket's in "Take on Me".) "I'm so in love with you", Andy sang, his voice overflowing and ecstatically soulful, and I've sung it right back - to him, to the song, to the big, wide world, and to life in general (and whatnot) every time I've heard it since. For 18 years straight.
There's never been a time when I wasn't in love with The Innocents. And my love for the album overflowed so much that it's even become a sort of classic in our family. It may be the one album that every single one of the great big bunch of us knows and loves. (Well, that, and the Broadway cast of Phantom of the Opera.)
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What is it that makes the album so damned special? Hmmmmmm... nothing. Seriously. Conceptually speaking, there's really nothing special about the album. At its essence, The Innocents is nothing more than a collection of chirpy three-minute pop songs, all strung together like shiny, brightly colored plastic beads with a throwaway instrumental ("Sixty Five Thousand") and a couple of extended mix bonus tracks (the dreary "When I Needed You" and an ebullient, shamelessly gender-unadjusted cover of Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High") thrown in for laughs. If songs were knick-knacks, then The Innocents would be a little Spencer's Gift shop tucked into the suburban mega-mall that is my CD collection.
It's not all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows to be sure. Clarke and Bell do manage some moments of social consciousness on the third single "Ship of Fools" and the gorgeous "Hallowed Ground", but their somber lyrics are tempered with soaring singalong hooks and dramatic (however phony) orchestral embroidery - and their beats are rarely less than chipper. On "Yahoo!", they come up with a totally delicious (and damn-near convincing) approximation of gospel; and "Witch in a Ditch" milks its anomalous waltz time for all the Renaissance Faire vibe it can get. But, for the most part, these are simple, amiable love songs. And if "A Little Respect" and "Chains of Love", both of which were modest hits at the time of their release (and have since grown considerably in stature), are clearly stand-outs, the truth is that just about any of these songs - "Heart of Stone", "Phantom Bride", the sweetly sympathetic "Weight of the World" - would have done well on radio.
It's unquestionably formulaic and, at times, even elementary and obvious, garish and unrepentantly gauche (even though Bell had yet to truly ramp up the flamboyance factor - naive high school girls could still have safely mistaken him - or at least, the songs - for hetero). What makes this album - Erasure's third studio record - both an early high point in the two-decades-plus-long career of the duo of Depeche Mode and Yaz founder Vince Clarke and diva-riffic vocalist Andy Bell and, aside from a singles collection, their single most "ownable" CD is that, by this point, they had perfected a joyous pop formula, they'd acquired the confidence to deliver (fabulously) with it, and (quite unlike the records that immediately followed The Innocents) they had absolutely no discernible ambitions beyond it.
The Innocents is, to put it simply, the most Erasure record Erasure have ever released; and it fairly dares the listener not to fall in love with it - for 18 years straight.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"The Innocents" by Erasure
Mute / Sire / Reprise Records
Released 1988
Produced by Stephen Hague & Erasure
51 min.
SONGS: A Little Respect - Ship of Fools - Phantom Bride - Chains of Love - Hallowed Ground - Sixty Five Thousand - Heart of Stone - Yahoo - Imagination - Witch in a Ditch - Weight of the World - When I Needed You - River Deep, Mountain High
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