I wouldn't say FrankMusik became a band member, he merely performed his job as the album producer. Judging from the three demos on the Tomorrow's World bonus disc, Andy and Vince put together a solid set of fully formed demos; they were then handed over to FrankMusik to polish and enhance them. Not unlike what Neil and Chris do with their recent demos. So, I would disagree that Tomorrow's World comes across as a FrankMusik/Andy Bell collaboration rather than a proper Erasure album. He took the demos and modernised them without losing the idiosyncrasies of Vince's sound.Undertaker wrote:It would be interesting to hear those songs that were deemed not good enough. I wonder if any actually made the album in the end, considering FrankMusik basically became a band member and completely overhauled everything. To me, it's a decent album but not really Erasure sounding at all.Eldritch wrote:Tomorrow's World was indeed decent but also very slight and curiously rushed for an album which was released after a four-year-hiatus. Plus let's not forget that Daniel Miller also binned their first bunch of demos, so the relative tightening in the quality control department could probably be credited to him.
Maybe the songs that were binned, stayed binned. There were hardly any b-sides or bonus tracks, considering they released a hell of a lot of songs on the double cd and all the singles. Most were remixes though. That's why i find it hard to understand that a 5 year wait basically lead to 32 minutes of new music.
What is disappointing is the rather insubstantial nature of the album, it is disappointing that after 5 years we get only 32 minutes of music. It may seem somewhat arbitrary to complain about the albums length, but the point is, if you're going to make an album of that nature, you need to eliminate all the filler, otherwise it doesn't work. Unfortunately, for Tomorrow's World, it doesn't do that, and although I think it's a good album, it's let down by 2 or 3 mediocre tracks. It's something you can't get away with when its a 32 minute nine track album.
To echo Undertaker's point about the lack of bonus tracks, I was also disappointed with the meagre amount of b-sides, there does seem to be a sense that Vince is nowhere near as prolific in his songwriting as he used to be. They just seem to do enough, and that's it, and because they live so far apart, it's not practical for them to get together to write a couple of new songs for the a single release. Compare this to their incredible output during the Chorus era; every single was loaded with great remixes and an array of high quality b-sides. It just makes the sparse nature of their releases all the more disappointing; mediocre remixes aren't really an enjoyable substitute. Admittedly, it's probably a little naive to expect anything more given that Vince is now a family man and his main priorities now lay elsewhere.
I hope we do get another Erasure album, as Tomorrow's World was a good, solid album and a return to form after the dreadful career low of Light At The End of The World. I still think that they've got another great album in them. However, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the last proper album we ever saw from them.
