Erasure and Frankmusik survive
In the face of our current cultural upheaval, Erasure’s new studio album almost defiantly compresses a broad range of inspired and inspiring pop references. Neither comeback nor throwback, Tomorrow’s World attempts to sum up the legendary synthpop duo’s 25-year career in just 30 minutes. This concision may be necessary for survival in the 21st century (and beyond). If so, consider this imperfect yet exciting and memorable album a time ca(m)psule.
Tomorrow’s World takes its title from a BBC program that aired from 1965 until 2003. A collapsed British cultural institution like Top of the Pops (canceled in 2006), the show introduced the U.K. public to the latest technological innovations by demonstrating them via live TV broadcast. When an iconic program dedicated to showcasing new technology becomes obsolete itself, we know that the relationship in the West between science and culture, art and commerce, has been radically reshaped. Of course, Tomorrow’s World survives today in the form of Apple’s megahyped product demo videos, but these are straight-up commercials, without pop culture’s crucial, civilizing buffer effect.
For the last 25 years, Erasure’s songwriter/performers Vince Clarke and Andy Bell have been rightly celebrated for their glitzy, campy dance anthems—pop surfaces buffed to a high sheen. But as popular culture hurtled into the new millennium and Clarke/Bell’s biggest hits (“A Little Respect,” “Chains of Love,” “Stop!” etc.) receded in the rear view, it became enough just for pop critics to point out Bell’s out homosexuality (groundbreaking in the ’80s), reducing Erasure’s identity politics to label aesthetics.
This widespread assumption of their irrelevance wasn’t exactly contradicted by unambitious Erasure albums such as the very fine Nightbird (2005) and the not-so-fine Light at the End of the World (2007). With Tomorrow’s World, Erasure, in collaboration with dance producer of the moment Frankmusik, reclaim and repolish their pop ambitions.
The opening track, “Be with You,” dives right into the pop moment with a synth line and chord changes similar to Kylie Minogue’s recent single “All the Lovers.” Erasure adopts the latest trends with a romantically minded pledge of faith to their audience: “And if the sky should ever fall/ Then I’ll come running/ Just you call/ I could be with you.”
The trance-inspired “Then I Go Twisting” plays out an ambivalence provoked by this attempt to ride the zeitgeist. From within an Auto-Tune cocoon, backed by a lonely click track, Bell sings, “Bored of this modern town/ Sick of this techno/ Monophonic sound.” But his reservations dissolve with the swell of the refrain as Bell is borne along by the teenage hormonal surge of Frankmusik’s production.
The coming together of Erasure and Frankmusik creates a pleasurable, piquant friction. A shameless maximalist, Frankmusik piles up inorganic noises and arranges the piles into unconventionally melodic pop-trash soundscapes, which he shakes with seismic drumbeats. This style derives from Clarke’s classic, intricate, layered synth compositions but totally lacks his Kraftwerkian discipline.
Evenly split between ballads and dance floor stompers, Tomorrow’s World’s restive production doesn’t always do justice to the songwriting’s more emotive moments. Bell never really gets to dig in his heels on the closing track “Just When I Thought It Was Ending”; his torch-song delivery is undermined by skittering beats that seem to be straining for a faster tempo. On the other hand, “You’ve Got to Save Me Right Now,” a girl group and gospel-inspired track, swings with an endearingly awkward—deliberate—heaviness that is well-suited to Bell’s blue-eyed electrosoul.
The album’s highpoint is also its midpoint: the banger “A Whole Lotta Love Run Riot.” Here’s where Frankmusik’s dumpster-diving sensibility and Erasure’s pop-encyclopedic ambitions reach their apex. The excesses of these two imperfectly matched aesthetics seem to reflect upon each other, heightening the humor and irony inherent in both. Bell’s heavily Auto-Tuned declaration, “She had such a glittering caree-eer,” comments on heedless pop fashion with a wry, mature awareness of venality. Frankmusik concludes “Whole Lotta Love” by deconstructing it; the pounding disco track breaks apart, showing its innards. It’s an ironic reminder of what makes pop music so powerful and dangerous: Though the product of industrialized forces, it can never be entirely controlled. It can get away from you.
Unfortunately, Frankmusik’s solo album, Do It in the A.M. (released last month), proves that his career as a producer and performer has gotten away from him to an extent. His new work—adept as ever but disappointingly faithful to dance-pop formulae—represents a step away from the extravagant sensitivity he displayed in his 2009 debut album, Complete Me. As with his uneven work on the Tomorrow’s World’s ballads, Frankmusik now seems uncomfortable, even suspicious when circumstances loom that call for an expression of vulnerability. His fear of exposure is common to a culture squirmingly seeking hipness. Tomorrow’s World, by contrast, gambles for relevance by confronting us with a pivotal choice between hipness and survival.
