It Guettas Better: Erasure Once Again Forestall the Old Folks' Club

Thanks in large part to my wife and her rigorous pre-marriage training seminar, I am able to speak with confidence and authority about the Erasure catalog. Including, in PopMatters, their new one that is pretty good but probably inessential. Way less essential than all-time great Cowboy, at any rate. From the review:

The winner of Most Cringeworthy Couplet on Tomorrow’s World is this bizarre little number, from “Then I Go Twisting”:

Think I’m going schizo / I bury my head in sand
I live in a disco / You’ve such a machismo hand.

Forget your everyday run-of-the-mill complaints about daft pop lyrics—“Who talks like that?”, or, “Since when is ‘machismo’ an adjective?” Such complaints cannot fathom the depths of meaninglessness in Erasure’s lyrics. I’d call those lines “decadent”, except decadence usually requires some work. Erasure’s lyrics make the Dave Clark Five’s 1965 club banger “Over and Over” (“Everybody there was there!”) sound like an ontological manifesto.