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Erasure: The Neon

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Mute Records
Released: 2020.08.21
Time:
 37:35
Category: Synthpop
Producer(s): Andy Bell, Vince Clarke
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.erasureinfo.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2020
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Hey Now [Think I Got a Feeling] (A.Bell/V.Clarke) - 3:45
[2] Nerves of Steel (A.Bell/V.Clarke) - 4:13
[3] Fallen Angel (A.Bell/V.Clarke) - 3:50
[4] No Point in Tripping (A.Bell/V.Clarke) - 3:49
[5] Shot a Satellite (A.Bell/V.Clarke) - 3:40
[6] Tower of Love (A.Bell/V.Clarke) - 3:42
[7] Diamond Lies (A.Bell/V.Clarke) - 3:07
[8] New Horizons (A.Bell/V.Clarke) - 3:06
[9] Careful What I Try to Do (A.Bell/V.Clarke) - 3:25
[10] Kid You're Not Alone (A.Bell/V.Clarke) - 4:32

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Andy Bell - Vocals, Producer
Vince Clarke - Keyboards, Producer

Keisha Jackson - Backing Vocals
Tarwana West - Backing Vocals

Ben H. Allen - Vocal Producer
Ben Etter - Engineer
Annie Leeth - Assistant Engineer
David Wrench - Mixing
Cécile Desnos - Assistant Mixing
Grace Banks - Assistant Mixing
Joel Davies - Assistant Mixing
Tim Pennells - Assistant Mixing
Matt Colton - Mastering
Paul A. Taylor - Art Direction, Design
Edith Bergfors - Photography
Phil Sharp - Erasure Photography
Mike Lupo - Studio Assistant
Nick Wilson - Studio Assistant
Parker Bradford - Studio Assistant
Royal Teague - Studio Assistant
Sam Tabacchi - Studio Assistant

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


ERASURE (Andy Bell and Vince Clarke) have announced details of their eighteenth studio album, The Neon, and share the album’s luminous opener, ‘Hey Now (Think I Got A Feeling)’. The 10-track album is out on Mute on 21 August 2020, and available on limited edition neon orange vinyl, limited edition green cassette and as a pre-order exclusive CD in a fold out orange foil blocked sleeve with fold out lyric and photography booklet, as well as to download and stream. The Neon is a place that lives in the imagination, that we – you and me – put in the real world. It could be a night club, a shop, a city, a cafe, a country, a bedroom, a restaurant, any place at all. It’s a place of possibility in warm, glowing light and this is music that takes you there.

Written and produced by Erasure, the album’s initial sessions saw the Vince and Andy reunited to work on the follow up to 2017’s World Be Gone with a fresh optimism and energy, in part born from their own recent personal projects. Vince goes on to explain, “Our music is always a reflection of how we’re feeling. He was in a good place spiritually, and so was I – really good places in our minds. You can hear that.” Taking inspiration from pop music through the decades, from bands Andy loved as a child through to the present day, he explains, “It was about refreshing my love – hopefully our love – of great pop. I want kids now to hear these songs! I wanted to recharge that feeling that pop can come from anyone.”

The album’s vocals were recorded in Atlanta, Georgia, with Vince joining Andy at the studio sessions, and the mixing was done by the band in London earlier this year. Photographs were shot at that time in the unique environs of Gods Own Junkyard, a gallery housing a huge collection of vintage neon. Andy enthuses, “I felt like it was being inside a virtual reality game. I loved that it felt like being in a different world. That’s what I want our new album to convey.”

The Neon offers us warmth and a brilliant brightness in our strange, silent times. It connects us to our pasts and our futures as it glistens with hope. It creates beautiful places where our imaginations can roam, bringing us together, twinkling and beaming. The Neon puts you and me in the real world again, now and forever, lit up and alive.

Mute Records



Of the artists to emerge from the first big wave of UK synth-pop acts in the ’80s, Erasure is one of the few still standing. Along the way, singer Andy Bell and synth fanatic Vince Clarke have weathered all manner of highs and lows—from their commercial peak in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when they landed four consecutive albums at the top of the British charts, to Bell’s 2004 announcement that he had been diagnosed with HIV nearly seven years earlier.

Most impressive is the continued quality of their music. By mostly sticking to their chosen lane—Clarke’s glitzy, club-ready electronics as backdrop to Bell’s beguiling voice and lyrics of emotional enchantment and anguish—the duo amassed an impressive collection of good-to-great albums. Their streak was broken only in 2017 with World Be Gone, a dour record tainted by slower tempos and existential fears fueled by an ugly political present.

While it steers in the right direction, Erasure’s latest full-length The Neon doesn’t quite get the pair back on track. The album is a deliberate effort to return to the sounds and mood of the material that first made them pop sensations: Clarke reached for the analog synths he’s had since the duo’s earliest days, and Bell describes the new album as “going back to the beginning.” In its best moments, like the gooey, glammy “Nerves of Steel” and the disco blurt of “Diamond Lies,” The Neon provides a flicker of the same electric charge found in early hits like “Sometimes” and “Chains of Love.” But Erasure mostly don’t reach those same heights. Though it’s often frothy and fun, The Neon is really the sound of settling—into middle age, into committed relationships, and into their place in musical history.

Throughout, Bell takes on the tone of an elder statesman, offering pleas of care and caution either to the younger men in his orbit or to a younger version of himself. “There’s a sweetness in your eyes/You better take my good advice/You’d better keep away from them,” he sings over a blowsy Moog melody on lead single “Hey Now (Think I Got the Feeling).” On album closer “Kid You’re Not Alone,” Clarke’s mid-tempo pulses and quick-fading synth surges mirror a lyric that serves as warning on how indulgence in “earthly delights” can lead to shame and regret.

Bell has long distinguished himself from his dance-music peers by singing more of romance and lasting love than hedonism or easy thrills. On The Neon, that tender-hearted quality comes alive in tracks like “New Horizons,” a stirring torch song about weathering life’s storms beside a loved one, and “Careful What I Try to Do,” a bouncy, bubblegum tune that’s flush with the delight of new romance. But the album fails to truly surprise. Were it not for Bell’s thicker, throatier vocals, there would be little to distinguish tracks like “Shot a Satellite” and “Hey Now” from those on 1997’s Cowboy or 1994’s I Say I Say I Say.

Erasure clearly are open to updating their classic sound, as on 2014’s The Violet Flame, where co-producer Richard X helped add a sharp, icy sheen to their otherwise effervescent tunes. They even presented a different perspective on the bleak World Be Gone by re-recording the album with Belgian neo-classical ensemble Echo Collective for 2018’s World Beyond. And each man’s activities outside of Erasure—Bell’s theatrical work, and Clarke’s left-field collaborations with Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll and Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware—proves that they can push themselves beyond the tried-and-true. The Neon nestles the duo back into their musical comfort zone when they’re exceedingly capable of more.

Robert Ham - Pitchfork.com



Stuck in lockdown, barricaded in our homes, fearful of contact with strangers, every expedition to the grocery or drug store an exercise in fear and caution, mask politics emerging as the touchstone for a world already gone to hell in a handbasket in so many ways. It's been a rough six months. And with surges re-surging, lockdowns rising and falling like the swing of a pendulum, and now election season descending upon the US (with the world looking grimly on), don't we, at last, deserve a break?

Cue Erasure's new album: The Neon. Music may not by itself cure all these ills, but the virtue of superb electropop is that it helps make them seem a bit less insurmountable. When have Erasure not been around to help us through the dark times? With hundreds of songs and 18 studio albums spanning a 35-year career, Erasure are like a sort of fairy godmother of electronic pop, always emerging during the dark moments of our lives to brighten things up with cheery beats and hopeful energy.

There is a steady constancy to their work, a faith in the sustaining strength of electronic pop music to bridge the ebbs and flows of more than three decades' worth of change. It's no exaggeration to say that the past 50 years have seen some of the greatest turbulence in human history. Most of the technologies a band like Erasure uses today to produce and promote their music were not even dreamt of when they first started making tunes. So when a group can navigate these shifts – social and technological alike – and pop out a new album as vibrant as any from the past three and a half decades, it means something special. Despite all his other projects and records, keyboardist Vince Clarke is never bereft of new ideas, still able to ensnare listeners in a web of irresistible synth magic. Singer Andy Bell, meanwhile, can dominate stage and screen alike with his irrepressible presence, hip replacements be damned.

The knowledge this dynamic duo are still hitting the studio for us means something, at times like this above all. Sometimes our creative idols leave us wanting, gaping in confusion rather than awe. A treasured death-metal band goes acoustic; a favorite goth outfit turns 'dark country'; millionaire pop stars take to their bathtubs on Instagram or call for general strikes and revolution. But through it all, Erasure remain our constants, ready to emerge in a halo-like spotlight over our shoulder and say, "What odds? Let's dance!"

That is not to say they lack innovation. Both Clarke and Bell are creative as heck, not just in Erasure but in their other projects spanning the years as well (Clarke: Depeche Mode, Yazoo, soundscapes and soundtracks, remixes, collaborations and more; Bell: solo projects, stage performances, theatre, soundtracks, and more). But there is a virtue to Erasure's constancy. It's because neither member has anything to prove – they've proven it, over and over again – that Erasure present as a stolid and reliable fixture of the airwaves and the dancefloors, not to mention the private hearts of listeners around the world.

"I hear the beat bop through my brain" begins the new album's first single "Hey Now (Think I Got a Feeling)". The familiar warm shower of buoyant electronic beats evokes all the power of those dancefloors currently denied us (check out the video). "Nerves of Steel" slides in subtly, low throbbing electronic rhythms wrapping the listener in an embrace as Bell sings comfort and reassurance: "Are you gonna make your way back here? Who rattled your cage?" The fairy electro-godmother sings soothingly, reminding us we haven't been abandoned. There's a video for this track too, which director Brad Hammer noted was pieced together "quarantine style, but all the queens turned it!" "Fallen Angel" is likewise reassuring, rhythmically as well as lyrically, with Bell gently urging us on to a warm bed of Clark's haunting synth work: "I had to change my ways…Fly like a fallen angel…I tried all of the things that give me love…"

There's a particularly queer comfort to Erasure's lyrics, underscoring the individual's need for (and capacity to) change, to hold themselves to account and take charge of rising above their barriers, while drawing solace in the knowledge of a community waiting to support us when we take the initiative. "There is no man that is an island…Climb down off of your horse, your kingdom to survey…" sings Bell in "Fallen Angel".

"No Point in Tripping" returns us to the dancefloor, with piercing beats clapping off the echoing synth rhythms in the background. "Shot a Satellite" follows a similar course, Bell perpetually kicking off with a voice every bit as robust, aspirational, and reassuring as when they first hit the studio over three decades ago. "Tower of Love" is a more emotional anthem, opening with a tremulous piano backed by subtle synth harmonies. "New Horizons" is another slow track, also backed by piano, and showcasing Bell's emotional balladry: "We will live to love again." "Diamond Lies" and "Careful What I Try to Do" return to electronic form with a quirky, buoyant boppiness. The album concludes with perhaps the most beautifully felt track of the album: "Kid You're Not Alone", which evokes the best of 1980s redemptive electronic ballads, injecting forgiveness, hope, and optimism all in one warm, slow-beat embrace.

"We'll come around and find our way through darkness, guided by the stars," sings Bell. Yes, we will, thanks to Erasure -- those most sparkling stars of all.

HANS ROLLMANN - 17 Aug 2020
PopMatter.com



The Neon is the eighteenth studio album from English synth-pop duo Erasure, released on 21 August 2020. The Neon is ‘Erasure’ personified, bright, colourful and electric – in fact, its that bright and electronic it should have an honourary place in Times Square or Shinjuku! The arrangements are sparse giving space for sounds to breath and don’t suffer from the need to clutter and for the majority, this offering is energetic, upbeat and full of life. It may seem more heavily 80’s influenced and contains some not unfamiliar Vince post-1989 sounds and some twee lyrics but the trademark hooks are still present and it’s unmistakably Erasure who are still on top of their game after 35 years.

In June 2020, it was announced via the Erasure Information Service newsletter that a new self-produced Erasure album would be released on 21 August 2020 on Mute Records. The album was recorded in Atlanta and mixed in London. The band has stated that they tried to go back to their original sounds. Clarke has used some of his older synths and Bell described the new album as “going back to the beginning. The album cover was created Paul A. Taylor. Bell stated the following about the album cover: “I love the effect of an old stone wall with a neon sign on it. To me, that always looks like the clashing of antiquity and modern-day.” The lead single "Hey Now (Think I Got a Feeling)" received its UK premiere on BBC Radio 2's The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show.

wikipedia.org



Als sich Vince Clark und Andy Bell zu den ersten Recording Sessions zu diesem Album trafen, den ersten seit "World Be Gone" im Jahr 2017, herrschte ein ganz besonderer Optimismus. Erasure geht es gerade gut und das hört man den zehn Songs des am 21. August via Mute erscheinenden Albums "The Neon" mit jeder Note und jedem Ton an

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