Review: Erasure – Cowboy (Reissue)

Review: Erasure – Cowboy (Reissue)
★★★★☆

Known to most devotees as ‘The album where Vince Clarke dressed as a cactus on tour’, 1997’s Cowboy is Erasure reminding fans and themselves what they stood for. After the muddled I Say I Say I Say detonated their commercial peak and the self-titled album was their prog equivalent, Cowboy returned Clarke and Andy Bell to pure pop and, as a result, the UK Top 10.

Although Bell has been slightly sniffy about 1990s Erasure, Cowboy doesn’t sound like a duo reluctantly trying to recapture past glories. The last Erasure album before Tomorrow’s World 14 years later to be wholly produced by external associates, the reliable Gareth Jones teamed up with Prodigy engineer Neil McLellan to oversee an instantly familiar array of pop straight out of the Circus template. Only the artwork and Sergio Leone riff in Treasure explicitly reference Cowboy’s title, and the rest of Treasure is as giddy as Love To Hate You.

Return To Pure Pop

The same urgency applies to Reach Out’s evocation of Oh L’Amour, while In My Arms was Erasure’s most addictive single since Always. The ballads thrived, too, keeping the grace of the self-titled LP while overlaying a high-end pop shine: Love Affair deserves to be more familiar.

Clarke & Bell’s prolific workrate of the time is demonstrated by the three rare tracks added to the 2CD reissue, previously only featured on the Buried Treasure II compilation. (The vinyl is freely available since 2016’s reissue, so there’s no accompanying repress of that format).

Although Earth doesn’t add much, My Love scurries about gleefully and In The Name Of The Heart is sumptuous pop which belonged with the main album. As is standard with Erasure’s current reissues, there’s an argument that Mute should add B-sides and mixes on a third CD.

In focussing on new mixes and rarities, they leave out the regular versions of Rapture and Heart Of Glass, while remixes by Jon Pleased Wimmin, Matt Darey, Tin Tin Out and Tall Paul are all missing. At least the new Blancmange and Stealing Sheep mixes are a treat.

For more on Erasure click here

Read More: Making Erasure – The Innocents