Like a Disney Cruise Over Troubled Water
Written: Mar 07 '04 (Updated Mar 08 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Erasure flex their craft on songs like "Mad As We Are" and "Freedom".
Cons: We generally don't like it when Erasure flex their craft.
The Bottom Line: This is not the Erasure we all know and love. But that doesn't mean we can't know and love it anyway.
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| plorentz's Full Review: Loveboat by Erasure |
Sunday afternoon, I fell asleep in my big leather recliner while listening to Erasure’s “Loveboat”, reading the opening chapters of a history of a New York City skyscraper that no longer exists. I drift off with visions of early twentieth century terrorists blowing themselves up in front of J.P. Morgan’s offices skulking in my head.
Later, half sleeping, half waking, this voice hovers in the room, like the voice of the heroine of a 1930’s radio melodrama, coming through on some weird space-time transmission…mad as we are, cannot fail…the voice is distant and familiar and nostalgic; but the music feels close and mechanical and alien - an old-time studio orchestra reproduced in bits and bytes and binary digits… sorts it out, burns a trail, speed of light…In my semi-consciousness, it feels like an angelic hallucination, a beautiful message beamed in simultaneously from the future and the past…hope flickering…
This is Erasure at the turn of the millennium.
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Just about every new Erasure album to come along since 1988 or so has been greeted with a familiar complaint: their songs are formulaic, sometimes even goofily so, recalling an era of pop music in which artists weren’t so hung up on self-reinvention, when what audiences loved about their pop stars was their familiarity, their reliability. Nobody expected Perry Como (whose “Magic Moments” Erasure once covered) to stop wearing cardigan sweaters and start singing the blues. Nobody wanted Rosemary Clooney to become a new version of herself with each new model year.
Likewise, we Erasure fans don’t expect much in the way of persona adjustment or sonic innovation from the duo of Vince Clarke and Andy Bell. Since the mid-80s, we’ve come to expect brief, bouncy, queeny, synthesized pop songs with infectious beats and singable choruses about becoming a victim of love, breaking the chains of love, loving to hate you, and all the other perils of modern (gay) relationships. When our boys do stray from their formula, as they did with their self-titled 1995 disc (which Clark affectionately called their “Pink Floyd album”, and which I love, by the way), we get a little out-of-sorts, and cry into our martinis, this is not my Erasure!
After that album, Erasure, duly chastised, retreated to their (and our) comfort zone for the album “Cowboy” (1997), but the following album “Loveboat” found the boys once again flexing their craft a little. The result? One of the band’s most interesting (however uneven) albums to date. And their least commercially successful. In fact, it would be nearly three years after its original European release before the disc got domestic distribution in the U.S.
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By the standards of Erasure devotees, “Loveboat” is a weird album. It finds the band reunited with producer Flood, and while all the Erasure trademarks are present - the chirpy melodies and songs of love and devotion, not to mention Andy Bell’s (over)dramatic singing - something about this album feels a little… off.
Maybe it’s the fact that the disc kicks off with the strumming of an acoustic guitar. Bell and Clarke always claimed that they wrote their songs on guitars (Clarke even appeared strumming one in the video of their 1988 hit “A Little Respect”), but they always checked their strings at the studio door. Guitars are all over this album, most notably on the lead single “Freedom”, but also in the surprisingly folksy ballad “Love is the Rage”, and the even more surprisingly rocking “Moon and the Sky”. Here’s an uncomfortable co-existence between the organic and electronic, but it often makes for some pretty bracing listening.
And then, there’s the way the album sounds. Unlike past records (even the “Pink Floyd” album), which all got pretty standard, radio-ready, pop production, the mix on “Loveboat” is shifty and foreign. Often, Bell’s voice sounds like it’s being beamed in via satellite, or recorded off a telephone line, while the instrumentation is remarkably present. In “Freedom”, the acoustic guitars ring while they’re being strummed, only to be silenced by a series of mechanical blips. “Surreal” sounds like an electrical current buzzing through the air without any grounding – all gauzy layers of willfully pitch-imperfect vocal and synthesizer harmonies, shifting from beauty, to cheese, to virtual unlistenability and back again.
When the production works – as on “Where In The World”, “Catch 22”, and the gorgeous “Mad As We Are” – the effect is not only beautiful, but even kind of moving. When it doesn’t work – as on “Perchance to Dream” – it’s simply ridiculous.
Still, “Loveboat” has gotten a bad rap – from folks that would have the guys faithfully reproducing their Sound of 1988 into the new millennium, like a sort of musical Thomas Kincaid, allowing for little or no artistic development. “Loveboat” may not be classic Erasure, and it certainly isn’t an Erasure classic. But it does have enough raw beauty to keep me coming back to it, even as “Wonderland” and “The Circus” collect dust on my shelves. Give this one a chance.
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“Loveboat” by Erasure
Mute Records
Orig. Released 10/31/00
First U.S. Release 2003
Produced by Erasure and Flood
45 min.
SONGS: Freedom - Where in the World – Crying in the Rain – Perchance to Dream – Alien – Mad As We Are – Here In My Heart – Love is the Rage – Catch 22 - Moon and the Sky - Surreal
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
plorentz
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Member: Paul Lorentz
Location: The Land of Limburger and Leinenkugel's
Reviews written: 952
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Somebody turn the lights on...
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