Erasure-The Two Ring Circus

The Two Ring Circus is an album that takes previously existing Erasure music and presents it in the form of remixes, live cuts, and (best of all) orchestral arrangements. It was released shortly after Erasure's second album, The Circus, and that's why it focuses solely on material from the first two Erasure albums.

The remixes on this album are not interesting in the least. They add nothing to the songs themselves and, if anything, add unwanted length to songs that were fine in their original forms. That's the way it is with 90% of remixes.

The live tracks are clearly taken from a show in Germany. Andy Bell makes a few attempts to speak a little German and the crowd just eats it up. The live tracks are pretty good. The two highlights are "Oh L'Amour" (the first version of the song I ever heard was the live version presented here. I got it on a mix tape that someone made for a friend's sister and it took years of looking to finally track down the right live version of "Oh L'Amour") and "Gimme Gimme Gimme" which could have easily been included on Abba-Esque.

The real highlight of the album are the orchestral arrangements. These contain no synths whatsoever. It's just Andy Bell and an orchestra. They picked three of the most gorgeous Erasure tunes to give this treatment to ("If I Could" "Spiralling" and best of them all: "My Heart...So Blue") and the effect is fantastic. Those three songs are the best reason to own this album.

This album is a pretty good listen once you get past the redundancies of the remixes. I recommend the back half of this album a lot more highly than the front half.