Receive Weekly Email and Text Message Updates:
Sign up for latest info on concerts, dining, promotions and more!
Go!

Most Popular

Reader's Picks

Top Recommendations

A short list of San Francisco's most popular hot spots.
user content provided by: LikeMe.net & SF Weekly

National Features >

  • City Pages

    Michele Bachmann, Unmuzzled

    You don't need to read Sarah Palin's book to hear the ravings of a mad woman.

    By Matt Snyders

  • Miami New Times

    Pimp Daddy

    The rise and fall of a chubby sex-cult leader.

    By Natalie O'Neill

  • Riverfront Times

    Babe 'n' Arms

    Tom was a hot-tempered cross-dresser with a garage full of guns--and then he became Rachel.

    By Nicholas Phillips

  • Dallas Observer

    The Fight for Texas

    Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison are locked in a battle over the soul of the GOP. They're also running for governor.

    By Sam Merten

Erasure

Light at the End of the World (Mute Records)

Share

  • rss

Tony Ware

Published on June 26, 2007 at 4:40pm

Synth-pop pioneers Vince Clarke and Andy Bell don't go for a spot of revisionism throughout Light at the End of the World, the newest proper studio album from the flamboyant duo Erasure. Twenty-some odd years have neither tarnished nor diminished Clarke's unabashed love of distended electro trills and thrills, without concern for bleeding-edge frills. Erasure exists outside the current of competition, happy to watch younger groups fret about keeping up with the Joneses.

Every few years, Bell — despite his double hip-replacement surgery, past battles with substance abuse, and coping with being HIV-positive — clicks his heels together three times and, indeed, there is no place like home. Erasure returns to the buoyant blue-eyed soul and exaggerated affectations that have been the group's tropes since 1986, love it or leave it. Lyrically, Erasure has become increasingly disclosing, as exhibited by Bell addressing his mother's alcoholism on "Storm in a Teacup." Dysfunction and devotion continue as the diametric balance kept by Erasure songs, which always bubble with unrequited yearning. Songs such as "Sunday Girl," "I Could Fall in Love With You," and "Sucker for Love" just deliver the angst at a brisker pace than the nocturnal patinas of 2005's Nightbird. Light at the End of the World is another Technicolor-sequined feather in what is to Erasure old hat.