Emily Bick talks to Andy Bell and Vince Clarke about how the future arrived as smartphones not flying cars. Pictures by David Wade
Erasure’s new album is called Tomorrow’s World, which raises all kinds of questions: are we supposed to expect an album that’s looking forward or looking back or looking back to looking forward? Futurism, retro, or retro-futurism? Especially when it comes from Erasure, a band that’s been going for more than 25 years. Through that time, whatever they’ve done, in that moment, they’ve owned. Soul ballads, high energy dance, operatic heartbreak and gloom and hope - hell, even Burt Bacharach - through it all, Vince Clarke’s arsenal of synths launch Andy Bell’s wounded choirboy vocals so they soar, and whimsical little filigree-pixel synthbursts twinkle in the background.
This is, after all, the band that resurrected Abba from existence as a dated, kitschy (but secretly always loved) retro-pop punchline with 1992’s Abba-esque EP. They went on to experiment with even more, stranger covers on 2003’s Other People’s Songs, where an especially brilliant cover of the Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ paired an overdose of autotune with a click track high in the mix that could have been swiped from the kind of Autechre mix that makes overcaffeinated programmers type faster.
It’s one thing to play with covers; that’s always an exercise in taking a song out of time and moulding it to an artist’s own aesthetic. Covering songs defines what the cover-er does. But what about originals? How much does production - and the choice of producer - have to do with giving a band’s new songs a signature that is both recognisable and experimental, current without being dated?
No comments:
Post a Comment