Erasure - Union Street

Erasure - Union Street (2006). Imagine that you have gone to an Erasure concert. The boys walk onstage, and immediately you get the sense that something is amiss. Where are the synthesizers? And then they start to play...wait, is that a guitar? They have gone...acoustic?
Stop imagining now, because on their latest album they have done just that. Composed mostly of stripped down treatments of past work, Union Street is an interesting experiment, which in theory should lay the songs bare and expose their soul. And occasionally, it works, but for the most part I found it to be treacly and meandering. Perhaps if I didn't have the context, the internal radio memory of how the original songs sounded, I could hear this album with less bias. I don't know. A few tracks do work well in this context, most notably "Boy", Piano Song", and "Home". And I found myself curious about other tracks that do not appear here; I actually think that the entire Chorus album is one of their most consistently well written all the way through and wouldn't have minded a "Chorus Acoustic" release. As it is, overall this is a spotty effort, which will appeal to the most die-hard fans and perhaps be interesting to non-Erasure devotees if they should somehow chance upon it.
Rating: one pair.