Erasure welcomes you to suck street

Maybe one of the downsides to Erasure having perfected the synth-pop song in the late 1980s is that they can't manage to break out of their formula. Although 1994's I Say, I Say, I Say and 1995's self-titled release showed a more mature group, little progress has been seen since then. Last year's Nightbird was a disappointing, tired retread, and Union Street is even more so in that it's an acoustic album of old B-sides and album tracks.\nI wouldn't have complained if they had made interesting unplugged versions of some of their exciting lesser-known songs, but instead they chose songs that were by and large downbeat (or even acoustic) to begin with. Why do we need an acoustic version of "Piano Song" when the original is nothing but a piano? The same goes for "Rock Me Gently" -- having stripped-down, unplugged instrumentation only makes what was a minimally produced but entirely arresting song boring. If it had been songs like "2000 Miles," "Phantom Bride" or "Don't Dance," I would have been really excited. Instead, they've redone songs like "Spiralling," which hardly had any music to begin with.\nThe drums on "Stay With Me" keep the song from sliding into the abyss, and Andy Bell doesn't sound as ragged-voiced as he does elsewhere on this CD. On songs like "Blues Away" or "Tenderest Moments" (the latter of which being a very good and practically unknown B-side), Bell's voice sounds weakened and strained. I realize that his voice may have suffered in the past 10 years because of complications from HIV, but the tragedy of that doesn't make an unlistenable song any more endearing.\nI think there's some indication of Erasure's vitality in the fact that their recent Greatest Hits album had barely added any new material since 1991's Pop! The First 20 Hits. This past decade has not been a particularly good one for Erasure, and at the end of the day, it's not particularly bold to say that the era of synth-pop is probably long gone. Clarke's old band Depeche Mode has somehow managed to keep themselves fresh, and yet Erasure keeps rehashing their past successes in newly-packaged, unconvincing releases. I mean, one-hit wonders Wheatus covered "A Little Respect" acoustically and made it phenomenal. Why can't the band that wrote the song do the same?