Nightbird

Listening notes

Inside Nightbird

Nightbird does not announce its importance with a stylistic stunt. It earns it through proportion. The arrangements leave Andy Bell room, the melodies do not need to shout, and the record’s emotional peaks arrive because the quieter passages have been allowed to exist.

“Breathe” is the large, durable single. “Don’t Say You Love Me” and “Here I Go Impossible Again” show the album’s other strength: familiar Erasure directness delivered with less decorative pressure.

This is the later album to give someone who believes Erasure’s album story ends in the early 1990s. Follow it with the acoustic re-framing of Union Street, which tests the songwriting by changing the instrumental world completely.