Erasure On the Road to Nashville Label: Mute Release Date: 02/20/07

It is easy to put a finger on many of MTV’s ultimately negative contributions to pop culture. Understanding that it has brought a great deal of incredible art to mass audiences who would never be exposed to it otherwise (or at least it used to do this when it highly emphasized music videos and programming), it now seems clear that the lasting legacy of the network seems to be vacuous reality programming, pervasive celebrity culture, catering to miniscule attention spans, and the prioritization of the tastes of middle school audiences.

All of these accusations are easy, but I would like to question a page in MTV history that is usually held in some degree of respect: “Unplugged.” The series was often praised for presenting popular acts in a setting that took away the flashy surface distraction of video culture and emphasized unadorned music in a relatively intimate setting. While the series did yield some amazing performances, I’m suspicious of the format. It seems to me that it is often simple and thoughtless to praise a superficial presentation of a “real” performance, reinforcing the erroneous idea that traditional acoustic instruments and untreated vocals are automatically more honest and higher in quality.

The result is a distinct culture that prizes “traditional” presentation of music above things like music being interesting, provocative, or innovative. This audience craves the smug comfort of long established notions of what music is “supposed” to be, and is hesitant to embrace anything that might challenge the way we think about sound and its effect on emotion and intellect. It bathes in the newness of music that self-consciously attempts to recreate the sound and image of a folk movement that is over forty years old that was itself a self-styled construct of artists superficially striving to appropriate the organic qualities of what it considered to be “real.” This audience sneers at music that dares to put machines to use just as their predecessors booed Dylan’s conversion to electric. We’ll call this culture the Paul Shagrue demographic, and they love “Americana,” a label in this decade as ultimately meaningless and arbitrary as “Alternative” was in the 90s (as much as I hear “Out of the Box” held up as a paragon of public radio, am I the only one who really misses the authentic eclectic rock program that was “Rollie Radio”?)

With the legacy of “Unplugged” and the rise of the sneakily conservative “Americana” label, it has become a smart career move for older artists well past their peak in relevancy or popularity to cash in on whatever nostalgia and good will they have left by recycling their hits in intimate acoustic clothing. Or to embrace their maturity with a covers album full of pre-rock and roll standards. Or to call in favorites from more popular artists to cobble together a half-hearted duets album. These albums can go platinum with Starbucks behind them. They are often cynical and vacant, their very creation somnambulated through, but are embraced for their conventional tastefulness, which typically means that nothing will challenge or radically surprise the listener beyond the “hey, its slower and quieter” level.

I am ambivalent when artists like Erasure tread these questionable waters, as on the newly released “On the Road to Nashville.” Its not that Erasure have ever been terribly radical, but they have been remarkably good for years, and have remained committed to making nakedly romantic, smooth, glossy synth pop. This approach has certainly earned them more than a few loyal fans, just as it has shut them off to more than a few listeners who refuse to take such music seriously.

When they record a live album performing many of their best known songs in Nashville with live acoustic instrumentation, it is in some way a triumph. When it succeeds, it forces the listener to focus on the songcraft in a new context, and proves that a synth duo, with only a rearrangement of their tools (replacing the keyboards and beats with live musicians), can sound as good and “tasteful” as many acoustic acts. When it doesn’t work quite as well, it becomes depressing to hear Erasure, an act with a unique feel and persona, reduced to the processed muck that is much “Americana.”

Perhaps this release is just a blow to my utopian aspirations. I’d like to see a world where synth pop was held in the same esteem as bluegrass. It would be nice if Erasure could be more widely acknowledged for their formidable catalog without being dismissed out of hand for its keyboards. It is frankly kind of sad to me that it may take this kind of release may get Erasure a lot of attention where they have been largely ignored stateside for years.

All of this pontificating aside, there are some great moments on this album. Particularly on simply presented ballads like “Boy,” “How Many Times,” “Spiralling,” and “A Little Respect,” the acoustic approach genuinely works in giving pretty songs a new approach. It is when the songs get more uptempo and the arrangements are strained to countrify themselves that Vince Clarke and Andy Bell sound like a generic gimmick cover band of themselves. Ultimately, I feel the album suffers from the flaws of most live albums: it is bloated, there are too many songs that, not actually being there, begin to suffer from sameness, and time is wasted to pauses stretched out by fawning applause and tiresome banter.

Personally, I could probably pick 5 or 6 of the 18 tracks and have a great EP for myself (and the next listener could probably do the same with an entirely different selection). Certainly it will play better with passionate fans, where I merely admire them and really like a few songs. Likewise, it will probably play better to ears with more of a tolerance for mainstream acoustic music than mine. Indeed, Erasure do prove here that they could have succeeded as a more traditional act. I can’t help but hope, however, that this was something they had to get out of their systems before the release of their upcoming original studio album, which had damn better have some keyboards on it.

Erasure - Myspace

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 5:04 pm and is filed under CD/LP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.