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This EP looks for all the world like a fans-only affair: here we have a duo who have been around for donkey's years, inextricably linked - for better or worse - with the synth genre they helped create. Would anyone other than a die-hard Erasure fan give what is essentially a remix album the time of day?
Perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Let's not forget that Vince and Andy's latest album, Light At The End Of The World, was particularly well received (critically if not commercially) earlier this year, and that a great handful of Erasure's attributes are once again de rigeur in the tastes of fashionistas everywhere.
As such, what's wrong with a little synth action, or, for that matter, a revision of a little synth action from a few months ago? Three versions of Storm In A Teacup? Hit me. Two tracks and sixteen minutes worth of Sucker For Love? It's what the kids want.
And who would begrudge the boys offering their ditties up to the gods (okay, purveyors) of trance? They're the grandfathers of such electronic abandon, and, more to the point, they still know how to pen some mesmerising anthems.
Koishii & Hush's take on Storm In A Teacup isn't a grand departure; just enough is done to stretch it to dancefloor fodder, while DJ Manolo rearranges Sucker For Love into self-indulgent Euro-trance shapes any trancehead could lose themselves in.
It's not all euphoria, though: as thoroughly enjoyable as remix competition winner Oscar Salguero's When A Lover Leaves You is, the Cyndi Lauper collaboration, Early Bird - perhaps the EP's single biggest selling point - falls rather short of the expectations of such a teaming. Good, but neither their nor her greatest.
And that, I suppose, is the taste Storm Chaser leaves in the ears: EPs, particularly those featuring several versions of the same song, are usually the preserve of the die-hard, and this is no different. At the very least, make the preceding LP your priority - if you haven't already done so.
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