Erasure’s Top 5 single ‘Breathe’ is one of the best things they’ve ever done. And I don’t particularly like or dislike Erasure, one of those bands who for me have risen without trace and have rarely strayed beyond the blind-spot since their 1986 debut album ‘Wonderland’.
Detractors and fans alike will discover little on ‘Nightbird’ – their 14th long player – to dissuade them from their hardened opinions. There is a ‘by-the-numbers’ feel about the album, despite its permanently engaging use of melody. The main disappointment is the inevitability of the arrangements which never look beyond the boundaries of verse/chorus pop and remain wrapped tightly and restrictively in Clarke’s once ground-breaking synthesiser sound that is now resolutely functional and tired. There is little acknowledgement of developments in rhythm patterns, with synthetic bass and simplistic drum machine patterns merely acting as lightweight supports for the melody lines. Where Clarke’s former Depeche Mode band-mates have experimented with their sound over the years, Erasure seem content to plough the same musical furrow, making few concessions for developments in technology, production techniques and displaying an almost perverse resistance to infusing the sounds of club-land into mainstream pop. Given Clarke’s early years as a pioneering pop songwriter using new technology, the lack of progression seems almost like a stubborn act of wilfulness.
The mood on ‘Nightbird’ at first appears bright and breezy but in truth it is never really refreshing or vital, there being too many songs that are presented like the equivalent of past seasons’ ‘must have’ off the peg clothes simply re-positioned on the shop-floor in a vain attempt to appear new. Andy Bell’s voice also sounds resigned and unenthused, despite the press blurb stressing that this is the band’s most ‘up-beat’ album in a while. In the light of Bell’s recent admission to being HIV positive and having undergone double hip replacement surgery last year I’m afraid that declarations of being “excited and raring to go” don’t sound totally convincing upon hearing the album.
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Tracks such as ‘I’ll Be There’, ‘All This Time Still Falling Out Of Love’ and ‘Sweet Surrender’ whiff too strongly of factory processed Euro-cheese while ‘Because Our Love Is Real’ and ‘I Broke It All In Two’ drift towards the type of mawkish songs that that another former pioneer Georgio Moroder used to pump out for 80’s teen flicks. Only ‘Don’t Say You Love Me’ offers a welcome master-stroke alongside ‘Breathe’, but the latter is still far and away the best thing on the album.
It is the predictability of the music that says more about the condition of Erasure than the understandable efforts of the press blurb to generate an optimistic viewpoint. Calling the album “uplifting, shiny and new” is over-polishing the product, giving it a superficial and compensatory sparkle that the lacklustre contents fail to match.
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