"Who's a bad girl tonight?"

Meet Andy Bell. For the past twenty-five years he's been the voice and face of Erasure, that UK bubblegum factory and tune demon. Only recently did he sprout wings, but from the band's first single, way back in 1985, he's written, uh, memorably about heartache.

On their latest release Erasure exceeded even its flaming standards. Light at the End of the World mostly serves to indulge Bell's private fantasy of getting sucked into the black hole of glamour never to be seen again except, perhaps, as irradiated love spewed from the plane's axis, a carnation trace in its terrible cosmic jets. The music is uniformly infectious, which is no surprise, but every now and then--not often, but enough to make listening mindlessly to the album impossible--its language veers into comic surrealism. This is not how post-disco prettiness is supposed to work. Hadn't we all been raised to expect less from dance music? Even unruly Funk offers us sanctuary from sense. When we play anything with a powerful beat--"Mother Popcorn" or "Summer Night City"--we long for the comfortable place beyond meaning where words truly do not matter (e.g. "I don't know Karate, but I know cuh-RAZY!"). Plenty of Light at the End of the World plays by these rules. But some of it, the best of it, doesn't.

Imagine: for nine minutes and three lovely tracks, you've been lulled by looping electronica into the lotus-land of pure dance, seduced, your mind silenced. And you don't care. Like Tennyson's mariners, you never want to return. Language means nothing to you now. Then, abruptly, a voice penetrates the narcotic haze, demanding

Give me back my calling cards and vices

My dignity and romance novels too. . .

For without love

I'm not tremendous.

Oh, it's a spinsterish twist on the smug thievery of the break-up song. Throwing himself into the pettiness of hurt, Bell couples his feelings of rejection with a violent cancellation, through the hording of shared possessions and memories, of the very person who rejected him. "Sucker for Love" is the gay answer to Ben Folds Five's "Song for the Dumped." Despite being the first mainstream hit to flaunt, brazenly and unapologetically, pop decorum, Folds' perennial write-off surely must rank below its Euro-challenger. It's true, Folds did reimagine the genre, bestowing us the immortal tercet

Give me my money back, I want my money back, you bitch,

I want my money back, and don't forget

To give me back my black T-shirt.

(The little touches, they make the song real. Everyone I know agrees: it's the bit about the black T-shirt that lifts the song from hateful chauvinism to cultural cool.) But Folds, savvy though he is, overlooked the fuck-clustering, star-consuming obvious:

Without love

I'm not tremendous.

Because, really, who is? Like a feathery pastel pleasure ejected from oblivion, Bell's goof clumsily, thinly drifts from that singularity through the entire album, a vestige of something far greater, and gayer, than we. How awkward. How reluctantly perfect.