Erasure
Nightbird
(Mute)
Much has been made of bands dropping their experimentation to go back to what made them famous in the first place - meaning that it's suddenly OK for U2 to get back to their naff, chest beating ways. Although Erasure are on a different planet to U2, they've basically done the same - dropping the moody introspection that culminated in 2000's Loveboat being a critical and commercial failure.
Nightbird harks back to the early days, a defiantly familiar set of disco-camp, despite the obvious shadow cast by singer Andy Bell's HIV positive diagnosis. This isn't a bleak record by any means - the typically quirky Here I Go Impossible Again could have been written in their 80s heyday, while I'll Be There is Stop!'s distant cousin.
Vince Clarke established himself as a true pioneer in the early 1980s, pushing the electronic envelope with Yazoo and early Erasure. But if you entered a time machine in 1987 and programmed it to send you to today, you'd dismiss him as being a bit of a one trick pony. The entire album sounds as if it could have been written on a Commodore 64.