(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
The most classic of British synth-pop bands, and also one of the longest-lived (but perhaps also the most overrated), Depeche Modefeaturing Dave Gahan (vocals), Andy Fletcher (keyboards), Vince Clarke (keyboards), and Martin Gore (keyboards)emerged during the romantic and futuristic trends of the early 1980s. The style they invented is one of the least original of that era, but also one of the easiest to digest, often echoing Tamla soul and Merseybeatthe most conservative genres of the 1960s.
The hits from the album Speak And Spell (Mute, 1981)namely Dreaming Of Me, New Life, and Just Can't Get Enough (released in February, June, and August, respectively)are mechanical little dances with catchy choruses (especially the third). Depeche Mode represented the quintessence of the genre, without the artistic pretensions of Ultravox or Roxy Music, simply reduced to music for dancing and whistling along. The arrangements were minimal, the vocals subdued. Within that fashion, very little was needed.
Clarke (who had written most of the material) left almost immediately to form Yazoo (and later Erasure), replaced by Alan Wilder (also an electronic musician), and the band settled into its classic lineup: Gahan sang with a sensual tone, Gore wrote thrilling songs, and Wilder arranged them with a futuristic and decadent taste. A Broken Frame (Sire, 1982) attempted to expand harmonic horizons by incorporating stronger funk and ska beats, but their success was due to See You (January 1982), faithful to the groups stereotype, with a slightly more complex arrangement of vocal harmonies and electronic counterpoints; Meaning Of Love (April), featuring an even catchier rhythm and chorus; and Leave In Silence (August). While the single Get The Balance Right (February 1983) and the album Construction Time Again (1983) left much to be desired, the latter included the proud declarations of Everything Counts and Love In Itself, which restored their usual melodic standard.
The album Some Great Reward (1984) was perhaps the first to be carefully crafted regardless of the singles. Possibly influenced by the new generation of synth-pop bands and their psychoanalytic musings, People Are People, Blasphemous Rumours, and the sadistic Master And Servant feature stormier rhythms, acrobatic arrangements, and wild timbres, even brushing against industrial music and musique concrčte. It may remain their best album.
Acknowledging the neuroses of modern life, Depeche Mode turned to atmospheric, melancholic, and existential pop with Shake The Disease (May 1985), Fly On The Windscreen (September 1985), still one of their masterpieces, as well as Stripped (dreamy vocals, Middle Eastern polyrhythms), A Question Of Time (stormy beat), and A Question Of Lust (a velvety ballad) on the album Black Celebration (Sire, 1986), the darkest of their career.
Music For The Masses (Sire, 1987), despite its ambitious title, was quite the opposite: a commercial and artistic failure relative to their standards. However, the singles Strangelove (one of their catchiest choruses), Never Let Me Down Again (emphatic piano figure), and Behind The Wheel (robotic, almost gamelan-like beat) represent the mature/elderly phase of synth-pop, which finally reached a massive audience. Even at their best, as with Strangelove, Depeche Mode seem simply like a living-room version of the Pet Shop Boys.
After the live album 101 (Sire, 1989), which cemented their worldwide fame, Wilder launched the Recoil project with
the EP 1+2 (1986) and the album Hydrology (Enigma, 1989).
Violator (Mute, 1990) marked a major turning point: alongside conventional tracks like Policy Of Truth (featuring a kind of rhythm and blues fanfare) and World In My Eyes (pyrotechnic syncopations and a cavernous Jim Morrison-like tone), two guitar-driven tracks stand out: Enjoy The Silence (an atmospheric riff over a heavy disco beat) and Personal Jesus (a vigorous boogie that would become their most aggressive song ever), with which Depeche Mode broke free from outdated synth-pop. The album sold 15 million copies over 25 years.
The guitar-driven rock of Songs Of Faith And Devotion (Mute, 1993) is the logical evolution toward U2-like sounds, imitating both their earnest poses and pompous arrangements, and above all the artifice of the entire operationthe suggestive power of sound for its own sake. Like U2, Depeche Mode draw freely from Black musical genres, from the boogie of I Feel You to the gospel of Condemnation, cleverly masked as dance-rock, yet they retreat to the solid disco-soul ballad of Walking In My Shoes. Despite the perverse postures in the grandiose In Your Room and the orchestral experiment of One Caress, the equation remains the familiar, predictable one.
As with U2, Depeche Mode mainly succeeded in capturing the depressed mood of suburban adolescents, representing the modern world through icy rhythms and suicide-themed lyrics. In reality, the banal music and moralizing lyrics of this group are typical of generational self-flagellation rituals that frequently recur in rock music. As they say in Britain, "style over substance."
Ultra (Mute/Reprise, 1997) was their first album in five years, the first after the overdose that nearly killed Dave Gahan, and the first without Alan Wilder. Barrel Of A Gun, which recalls the fake psychedelia of the Beatles more than the polyrhythmic dance music of the time, and It's No Good (which returns to the spleen of Fly On The Windscreen) are the two singles. Martin Gore is the brain behind the operation, but the album is dominated above all by the ghost of Gahans voice.
The Singles (Reprise, 1998) is the only one of their albums worth owning (for those patient enough to endure two hours of these cocktail-lounge litanies).
Depeche Modes career is one of the least creative of its time, but, as with U2 and the Smiths, it is one that takes the catchiest elements of a genre and turns them into an international koine, whether or not this pleases the musical geniuses attempting stylistic acrobatics.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Alan Wilder had not been more successful (neither artistically nor commercially) as
Recoil.
The debut EP 1+2 (1986) contained two lengthy instrumental compositions,
1 (14:24) and 2 (18:37). Each one is a childish collage of industrial music: manipulated found voices, electronic drones, electronic beats, etc.
Hydrology (Enigma, 1989) collects three compositions, notably
Stone (14:32), that sits halfway between a
Mike Oldfield suite and
Philip Glass opera,
and The Sermon (15:03), that bridges minimalist repetition and
Kraftwerk's machine music.
It's another amateurish work from a well-intentioned but presumptuous apprentice.
When Wilder resurrected the Recoil project, it twisted towards the good old-fashioned song format, hiring a number of vocalists and abandoning the electronic collage: Bloodline (Mute, 1992) contains five songs and two instrumentals.
Faith Healer (the standout and possibly the best Recoil song ever) is a melodramatic variant of Alec Empire's digital hardcore as if arranged by Jim Steinman.
Electro Blues for Bukka White is a failed experiment of merging blues and techno.
The sensual vocals of Toni Halliday carry the moronic ballad Edge to Life and the bombastic threnody of Bloodline.
Moby raps in Curse, a hip-hop and techno crossover.
One instrumental, The Defector, is so trivial and repetitive that it sounds like a remix of Faith Healer. The other one, Freeze, is another Philip Glass imitation.
Similarly, Unsound Methods (Mute, 1997) employed a handful of guest vocalists:
Nitzer Ebb's Douglas McCarthy helms the tedious and confusing Incubus and, more importantly, the psychotic horror vision of Stalker (the new standout);
Siobhan Lynch provides sensual vocals to the noir soundscape Drifting
and to the trip-hop ambience of Missing Piece;
Maggie Estep recites her poetry
(a` la Patti Smith)
over the psychedelic and cacophonous Luscious Apparatus,
and then over the evolving neurosis of Control Freak;
Thomas Dorsey intones Red River Cargo amid a chaos of samples and nois;
etc.
Liquid (Mute, 2000) falls into the trap of spoken-word performance.
The "vocalists" populate instrumental backgrounds that have no artistic ambition.
Only when
Diamanda Galas
takes center stage in Strange Hours we hear something worthy of attention,
and Wilder seems spurred to provide a more creative background.
Alas, there is little music worth of the name on this album.
Depeche Mode's
albums of the 1990s betray how
the band's sound relies on catchy
refrains. Left to itself, it is as entertaining as Roger Waters' 100th requiem.
This meandering and pointless arrangements are only useful to fill another
album of titles and to make some money out of it.
For anyone who liked
Depeche Mode, the problems of
Exciter (Mute, 2001)
were simply that 1. there was
no theme to it (no, it is not eclectic, it is just erratic) and that 2. there
was no song to remember.
For those who didn't
like Depeche Mode, this confirmed that
every Depeche Mode album was, first and foremost, a concentrate of cliches,
except that this time Gore was running out of
cliches and had to stretch the palette a little bit.
The melodramatic ballad Breathe and the subdued ballad
When The Body Speaks sort of mark the territory.
Within that range, the dance-floor locomotive of I Feel Loved,
the electronica a` la mode of Dream On,
the suave Enya-esque soundscape of Goodnite Lovers
tell us what they have been listening to in the four years since the last
album.
(Free Love and Shine mimick their old sound, for the sake of
the fans and the former does strike a chord or two even among the most
cynical).
By the standards of their albums, here they are taking big chances.
For them, something like The Dead Of Night
is industrial music (Nine Inch Nails eats this for breakfast).
The instrumentals Lovetheme and Easy Tiger
are nice new age music (possibly their future as individual artists).
But, for the first time in a long time, one can actually listen to Gahan's
lyrics, who has rarely sounded less moronic.
Now that everybody admits their previous albums were not as great as originally
advertised, we can claim that this is no worse.
That doesn't make them Beethovens, and it doesn't
make this one a masterpiece.
Martin Gore's Counterfeit (Mute, 1989) and Counterfeit 2 (Mute, 2003) collect covers.
Dave Gahan's Paper Monsters (Mute, 2003) is an atmospheric tour de
force that proves the importance of the vocalist in crafting the band's
ambience. Gohan relied more on the electronic arrangements on Hourglass (2007).
Martin Gore's gloomy, angst-ridden compositions on
Playing The Angel (Sire, 2005) had little to envy of his past
glories
Precious, A Pain That I'm Used To, John The Revelator).
Recoil returned with Subhuman (2007), boasting the nine-minute
Bjork-ian ballad Allelujah
(crooned by Carla Trevaskis)
the eleven-minute
whispered Arabic blues
Intruders
(sung again by Trevaskis),
and especially
the poignant and spirited ten-minute The Killing Ground, a
plantation chant (Texan bluesman Joe Richardson) coupled with
gospel organ, slide guitar and techno beat (and later orchestral strings).
Surprisingly, Wilder made Recoil's best album twenty years after inception.
Depeche Mode's
Sounds Of The Universe (EMI, 2009) topped the charts all over Europe.
Alas, that doesn't make it any more listenable.
In Chains is a typical atmospheric Depeche Mode ballad except that now it has to be surrounded by a plethora of disorienting sounds. Nonetheless this
is an album of
shameless old-fashioned pop ballads such as Jezebel.
The main attraction of Hole to Feed is the brutal swinging beat, ruined by the usual obnoxious crooning (Nick Cave minus the passion).
The best can be found in pieces such as Fragile Tension and In Sympathy that wed pulsing electronics and spleen-infected aria.
Miles Away / The Truth Is is the better version of this idea.
Another highlight is Come Back, that piles up
hypnotic metallic noise and guitar noise for a pop ballad
with a slightly dissonant bluesy Beefheart-ian attitude.
Corrupt is a nine-minute electronic blues ruined by slow monotonous vocals.
The ancestral problem of Depeche Mode was and is that the vocals are just dead boring, stuck to ancient archetypes even when the music tries to sound "futuristic".
The trio released Delta Machine (2013) and Spirit (2017) to a largely indifferent public.
Andy Fletcher died in 2022.
Gahan and Gore continued as a duo and released a new Depeche Mode album:
Memento Mori (2023).
