HITS! The Very Best Of Erasure (CD)
Erasure HITS! The Videos (DVD)
If Erasure isn’t the gayest band you’ve ever heard, then the book needs to be rewritten, the deck needs to be reshuffled, and those dance floors need to be cleared. When “Oh L’Amour” broke in 1986, it only reached number 85 on the UK charts, but it set the stage for an illustrious career for the duo of Andy Bell and Vince Clarke (also one of the founding members of Depeche Mode and Yaz). The flamboyant Bell was the perfect vehicle for their sugary brand of electro-pop, and some 17 years later it is evident that the aforementioned sugar has caramelized itself into stone. Erasure has forged a legendary career full of sticky-sweet pop hits, and this Greatest Hits collection is a fitting tribute to their storied history. The DVD disc is only further acknowledgement of their unbridled flamboyance and the way in which it ties itself to their music, weaving in and out of every line and every movement. • Andy Bell makes as pretty a woman as he does a gorgeous man, taking the lead role in an era of music videos that encouraged a type of fun which was fashioned from that organic element of the band having a say in the images and thoughts their visual element would communicate. Without the videos, you still have the songs, but what Erasure has done with the music video is incredibly groundbreaking in terms of what they were doing with (at the time) somewhat limited tools. There were very few special effects, but loads of sharp camera work and the relentless pursuit of every perfect angle into which Bell’s face could fall (which were a lot). • But it is the editing that makes the videos work—the timing of the images in with the songs, subtle movements in the sets which are choreographed with the music in flawless meter. Easily the most brilliant example of this is “Love to Hate You,” with director David Mallet’s meticulous work slinging itself all over the map in a flurry of magnificent backdrops, implausible lighting, and a peculiar story that has you begging for the next page to turn itself. • Erasure was and still is a flexible muscle of pop music—all over the place in every song, constantly reinventing themselves as if the canvas needs to be re-stretched every time they created something new, and that is what has been their strongest point all along. Despite what they have done for themselves and in the space of their own career, what they have formulated musically over the years has opened the doors (and the public ear) for newer acts such as New York City’s synth-pop darlings Soviet, who might just be the next carriers of the torch in the sticky-sweet dominion of electro-song. Watch out. From Sire/Mute (www.mute.com). —Lance Walker
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