Album review: Erasure, Tomorrow’s World

Erasure, Tomorrow’s World

Mute, £12.99 **

WHAT does a pop group do when it becomes part of the furniture? Accept that it is a comfortable old couch, a bit tired and tatty maybe but still pretty much fit for purpose and loved just the way it is? Go for a snazzy upholstery job in the hope of a new lease of life? Or decide that it has had a good run but it is time to be consigned to the scrapyard?

Facing such a future, REM recently announced their split after 30 successful years. They probably could have motored on for many more but disbanded with dignity. Family flowers only, please.

Erasure, meanwhile, have now hit their quarter century with, apparently, not a single argument to look back on and pick over. When your working relationship is that harmonious and the tours are still enthusiastically patronised, the decision becomes about whether to coast or not to coast.

The duo command that enviable combination of affection and respect, but they haven’t delivered a classic pop song for many years. Perhaps mindful of this, frontman Andy Bell has dismissed their most recent album Light at the End of the World as “throwaway, old-style Erasure”. Upholstery job it is then.

In the four years since its release, Bell and keyboard maestro Vince Clarke have done other things, seen other people. Clarke hooked up again with his former muse Alison Moyet for the Yazoo reunion tour. Andy Bell competed on Popstar to Operastar and recorded a solo album, Non-Stop.

When they reconvened, they decided to experiment with a ménage-a-trois, inviting fellow synth lover Frankmusik in (initially at the suggestion of a fan) to reboot the franchise, as it were. Frankmusik, aka Croydon-born producer/performer Vincent Frank, is now based in LA, where he most definitely means business, collaborating with the heavy duty likes of Lady Gaga and Pet Shop Boys. One of a new generation of electro-pop upstarts, he was born the same year that Erasure released their debut single Who Needs Love Like That and, thanks to his Erasure-loving mum, grew up on their catalogue. So it’s a natural fit – just not one which has produced remarkable results.

Tomorrow’s World lacks what Bell calls the “passionate pathos” at the heart of their best writing. This is not their best writing and what emotion there is in the lyrics or magnetism there is in the melodies is sacrificed to the sleek, sterile lines of the production.

Overall, it’s a musically upbeat, lyrically downbeat collection, written while Bell was feeling all at sea in his personal life. In as much as 1980s electro pop is back on trend, it sounds reasonably current. At some points, there is little to distinguish it from any other precision-tooled chart missile. The dancefloor banger A Whole Lotta Love Run Riot could be the work of almost any homogenous electro pop act of the day, thanks in part to the robotic Auto-Tune effect on the vocals.

Bell is well-regarded as a singer but he sounds quite anonymous here. Kylie’s recent albums were apparently a touchstone, which makes sense, because this is largely streamlined, efficient and soulless dance pop stuff. Check out the rote devotions on opening track Be With You – the music has a wholesome guilelessness which neuters its expression of desire and the darker tendencies of lines such as “I love it when you haunt me everywhere I go”.

You can hear the Kylie connection again on the stealth anthem Fill Us With Fire which teams a reasonably rapturous melody in the verses with an expansive chorus and addresses the world’s ills in sanitised style, calling for a global baptismal cleansing.

The serviceable trance track Then I Go Twisting carries a more disillusioned modern-life-is-rubbish assessment, inspired by a period when Bell was kicking his heels in an everyday-is-like-Sunday seaside town.

Other personal numbers are easily identified by titles which tell the whole heartbreak story – What Will I Say When You’re Gone, Just When I Thought It Was Ending, You’ve Got To Save Me Right Now (which is at least attacked with some diva welly) and the single When I Start (To Break It All Down).

According to Clarke, the lyrics for the latter are “loosely based on the early romantic works of Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky”. According to Bell, it’s loosely based on Love Me Tender. The finished product sounds loosely based on an X Factor winner’s single.

There are snatches of soul, of elegy, along the way but it’s mostly a struggle to feel much of anything at all. Even I Lose Myself, a know-yourself anthem which sounds like old school Erasure remixed for a rave, feels more functional than celebratory, which is a real pity coming from a group who have done so much over the years to give electro pop a heart.