It's always a little disheartening for me to see the publicity surrounding each new album by the techno-pop (remember techno-pop?) duo of Erasure. There's a general laziness to it, and you'll always find some comment about how it's the best singing Andy Bell's done, how all Erasure albums sound the same, or - my personal peeve - how it's a "return to form". In a recent article on Billboard.com, Erasure's newest album, Nightbird is described as a "return to form" after "misguided" studio albums like 1997's Cowboy or 2000's Loveboat, a description made all the more frustrating by the fact that both of those albums were praised at the time of their respective releases as returns to form after "misguided" (read: truly daring) studio albums like 1994's I Say I Say I Say and 1995's Erasure (which ten years later, remains one of my all-time favorite albums by anybody).
After a while, you have to wonder if these people, who actually get paid to listen to music and then write about it, aren't just pulling a nasty Jayson Blair act on their public, pulling a few standard lines out of their butts, and phoning 'em in from the more "relevant" locale of say, Rob Thomas's forthcoming solo disc, or something.
As a die-hard fan of Erasure, someone who has lived with their music, someone who has literally grown up alongside it since the release of their first record way back in 1985, I have suffered the repeated indignity of having to explain to otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people - folks who I have every reason to believe are not deaf - that, indeed, no two Erasure albums are quite the same, that every one has its own unique handprint, and that, yes, they have released some truly amazing singles beyond 1988's "A Little Respect", and by all means, yes, they are still vital artists worth paying attention to. All to little effect. Even my younger brother Mike, whose musical taste was largely formed in the image of mine, still has yet to give a shit about anything Erasure has done since the end of the Reagan administration.
As Colonel Kurtz might have said in my position, "The futility! The futility!"
But perhaps even more frustrating-disturbing-discouraging than critics' apparent myopia regarding Erasure's rich discography, is my own sudden instinct to mimic some of their old, moldy standard lines with regard to the group's latest.
Admittedly, Nightbird is not a return to form, but then Cowboy and Loveboat weren't misguided either. (On the other hand, Other People's Songs, their 2003 covers album is awful.) But, yes, it certainly does sound like every other Erasure record (or a least an Erasure record in the generic sense), and oh yes, Andy Bell's singing really has never sounded better than it does here (even if he's starting to look like an unambiguously gay cartoon superhero - but now, I'm just being catty) - he sounds controlled, mature and soulful, most especially on the gorgeous album opening "No Doubt."
Ten years ago (or even five), hearing this album, I might have bristled like a hedgehog as the critics inevitably dismissed it as "more of the same" from the band, if they even bothered to write about it at all. I would have pointed out to anyone who would stand still long enough to listen that, in fact, Nightbird has the biggest, lushest bass sound of any Erasure record to date and that Vince Clarke has exchanged the pizzicato blips and mechanized whirrs of albums like Chorus (1991) for darker, legato string washes; that the steely-blue electro-pulse of "Don't Say You Love Me" is the closest he's ever come to the Teutonic New Romanticism of turn-of-the-Eighties Ultravox; and that the celestial shimmer of "Here I Go Impossible Again" is an entirely different kind of celestial shimmer than the celestial shimmer of Erasure standards like "Oh L'Amour" and "In Your Arms" - grander, more three-dimensional.
I might have also paused in reveries to register my disappointment in Andy's uncharacteristically boring lyrics; how much a letdown it was to see a guy who could be as queeny, over-clever, and self-indulgently wordy as he was empathetic and soul-searching, a guy who could write a line as succinctly subversive as "don't say your love is killing me" or something as scrumptiously syllabical as the chorus of "Drama!", falling back so easily on lazy, apoetic cliches about always being there for you and taking all the hurt away.
But then, on my first few listens, I found myself simply not caring as much as I used to, thinking that the album was neither bad enough to be angry about, nor wonderful enough to be celebrate. In other words, words borrowed from the critics I might have bristled at, the album was simply and unfortunately "more of the same."
Until I got to the end - at the point in the album closer "I Bet You're Mad at Me" when the boys repeat the inherently repetitive chorus at least have a dozen times - never flying off into ad-libs or key changes or grandiose orchestrations, relying solely on the insistence of the words and the melody, the cumulative impact of those short - almost bullying - phrases to build the drama. Suddenly the song ends, and in those brief seconds of echoey afterglow, it hits me:
I do care! I care about the new Erasure album!
And while Nightbird may not be a return to form, neither is it more of the same. Yes, like all other Erasure records, it certainly sounds like an Erasure record, but it doesn't sound like any other Erasure record. And if, songwriting-wise, they're still panning for gold in the same river they always have, the fact that they're still pulling out so many shiny techno-pop nuggets is wonderful news indeed!
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Nightbird" by Erasure
Mute Records
Released 1/25/05
Produced by Erasure
46 min.
SONGS: No Doubt - Here I Go Impossible Again - Let's Take One More Rocket to the Moon - Breathe - I'll Be There - Because Our Love Is Real - Don't Say You Love Me - All This Time Falling Out of Love - I Broke It All In Two - Sweet Surrender - I Bet You're Mad At Me
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