Morning Commute: Depeche Mode - Music For The Masses

The imperial phase begins.

1987's Music For The Masses saw a significant break from the past in the form of an outside producer stepping in for the first time; David Bascombe replaced Mute head Daniel Miller, who had produced all of the band's previous albums. Whether it's this change or simply the band's skill in the studio continuing to increase, there's a scale to the sound here that dwarfs all that came before it, never more so than on opening track "Never Let Me Down Again" which is simply fucking massive, a distorted electric guitar riff cut short by the slam of a drum and into a slice of thumping  industrial dance that was the minor single from the album in terms of chart success but would go on to be a staple encore to the present day. It's a deserved legacy for an all-time classic, a lyric that may or may not be about drug abuse paired to a driving rhythm and a terrific Gahan/Gore chorus. Live, where it's given room to breathe in a version based on the 12-inch Split Mix, it's a stormer. If not the strongest Depeche song ever, it's top three for me.

Elsewhere, the mood is somewhat lighter than Black Celebration and even Some Great Reward - if the band are still trading lyrically in the seamier side of life then some of it is balanced somewhat by a danceable, more upbeat approach, particularly in lead-off single "Strangelove", more successfully dealt with here in an album-specific version than on the preceding 7-inch - the major changes are an extended coda and more fundamentally the elimination of the first chorus in favor of going straight into the verse,  a simple edit which seems to give the song more weight than the overly poppy single version. In a similar vein, "Sacred" is infectious uptempo pop, marred slightly by a cringe-inducing lyric that puts Gahan in the unenviable position of suggesting he's a bit like a missionary, but instead of bringing religion to the unenlightened, he's bringing his willy. "Nothing" is the band in uncharacteristically groovy mood, with a funk guitar riff over a dance beat that belies the nihilism of the lyric.

It's not all sunshine, and the darker songs on Masses see the band at their most musically experimental, particularly on "I Want You Now", built entirely around heavily treated non-verbal vocal samples alongside a Gore-sung lyric that's about as fundamental and direct as Martin would ever take his favorite topic. "To Have & To Hold" is brief but brilliant, kicking off with an ominous spoken Russian sample before a single nearly monotone verse of Gahan at his darkest and most scabrous, pleading for "forgiveness/someone to bear witness", to take away "all this decay". It's filthy and foreboding, and easy to consider in retrospect as a foreshadowing of Gahan's imminent plummet into several years of junkie hell.

Third single "Behind The Wheel" is perhaps the song on Masses that could have sat most comfortably on Black Celebration, industrial percussion and a thumping beat coupled with a brilliant simple pulsing bassline  while "Little 15" is "A Question Of Time" on the morning after, with Gahan backed by a repeated minor-key organ figure as he seemingly addresses an associate of the subject of the earlier song. I hope it's the same person anyway; otherwise there's an awful lot of 15-year-olds running around this part of the discography.

Violator is almost universally regarded as Depeche Mode's best album, and it's arguably a more technically accomplished and stylistically cohesive work, but Music For The Masses' combination of club hits and quirky experimentation, its mix of light and dark, its deeply strange promotional videos and suddenly, surreally massive world tours and stadium gigs (rarely has a title, presumably coined ironically, been so apropos) just wins it for me as a personal favorite. It's the dividing line between Club Mode and Stadium Mode, the last album unfettered by the weight of world domination (although Songs Of Faith & Devotion also found the band confounding expectations, if under radically different circumstances). If there are flaws, they're relatively minor – the sequencing front-loads the album somewhat, and bunging the concert intro music "Pimpf" on as the final number feels a bit cheap, particularly since the track had already shown up as the b-side of "Strangelove", but these are relatively minor nits; Music For The Masses stands up today as a classic release, a triumphant consolidation of the strengths of the previous albums.

On the singles front, the remixes came thick and fast - "Strangelove" alone got half a dozen on initial maneuvers as well as another couple on staggeringly pointless US-only release "Strangelove '88" the following year. "Never Let Me Down Again" is at its best in the Split Mix, which essentially drops an edit of the heavy industrial deconstruction of the Aggro Mix on the end of the single version to the benefit of both. "Behind The Wheel" dropped its pulsing bassline in a butchered Shep Pettibone 7-inch mix but found its métier in the various 12-inch versions, of which the strongest are the sample-laden Beatmasters Mix and the US exclusive Megamix that segued the song in and out of b-side (and first DM cover) "Route 66". That b-side showed up in two 12-inch mixes of its own, both excellent, both incorporating elements of "Behind The Wheel" and both completely different sonically - the American TV sampling rock'n'roll  of the Beatmasters Mix and the heavy electronics and distortion of the Casualty Mix. Most of these mixes, with the notable exception of the various US Behind The Wheel/Route 66 medleys, would show up in the Singles Box compilations, but if there's a single classic from an artifact point of view it's the Limited 12-inch [L12BONG15] "Behind The Wheel" (Beatmasters Mix)/Route 66 (Casualty Mix), memorably released on yellow vinyl by the Germans, who were heavily into that sort of thing at the time. Brilliantly, the typography on the cover features an umlaut over the "T" in "The". Try pronouncing that.

Cover art – last of the T&CP efforts before Anton and his Magic Crayolas took over, and it's a good one, though the parts are probably slightly stronger than the whole, from the DM logo that launched a thousand shirts to the iconic orange loudspeakers that also appeared, in photographic or iconographic form, across the single formats.

It's worth a brief mention of the companion pieces to Masses, the concert film and double album 101. The live album is arguably the more successful of the two, a strong run through a 90 minute set leaning heavily on Music For The Masses and Black Celebration, while D.A. Pennebaker's documentary is somewhat marred by the melding of concert film with documentary footage featuring half a dozen of the more annoying fans you'll ever see and some fairly unenlightening backstage footage, although it's worth it for the synth geeks to get 90 seconds of "Black Celebration" tutorial from Alan Wilder, and for everyone else for the haircuts. A videotape compilation of the atmospheric Anton Corbijn promo clips for the singles (plus "A Question Of Time" and "Pimpf"), Strange, was also released around this time; it's currently out of print, rendered semi-redundant by later collections (although the versions of "Behind The Wheel" and "Never Let Me Down Again" on Strange are longer than those currently available, and "Pimpf" hasn't shown up since).

Below, "Never Let Me Down" from 101. Skip past the backstage twattery for arguably the iconic performance of this song; the moment where the crew hits the lights at 4:05 for wavy hands time is still stunning; the emotion on Gahan's face is palpable. Below that, "Strangelove" three years later on the World Violation Tour.

Morning Commute: Depeche Mode - Black Celebration

Depeche Mode took 1985 off, filling the gap with a compilation rounding up their singles to date that included two new songs, the strong "Shake The Disease" and the alarmingly inessential "It's Called A Heart".  The following year they'd return with simultaneously the apotheosis and the abandonment of their industrial period, Black Celebration.

Lyrically their darkest work to date (indeed, in some danger of self-parody on "Fly On The Windscreen"), it also marks the point where the post synthpop Depeche came of age; the album is again a step forward in maturity and compositional sophistication from Some Great Reward, simultaneously more complex and layered yet with more space in the music than before. It's immediately apparent on the title track that kicks off the album, which fades in as menacingly as "Blasphemous Rumours" faded out some 18 months prior, a John Carpenter/Halloween-esque synthesizer sequence blending with ominous, unintelligible vocal samples (including, famously, Mute boss and DM producer Daniel Miller's Winston Churchill impression). Dave Gahan enters, heavily reverbed, harder-edged and rawer than before. The song takes its time to build and unwind, but when it comes in full force it's with an authority beyond anything the band had released previously, even if the lyric is essentially a rewrite of "Something To Do". Five minutes later it fades out as it began, into the sampled breathing and heavy percussion of "Fly On The Windscreen - Final", which, as the name implies, is making its ultimate appearance here after initially cropping up as the b-side to "It's Called A Heart", before the mood lightens and slows a little with Martin Gore taking lead vocals on the gorgeous "A Question Of Lust", a full production layering strings and bell-like synths under his strongest singing to date. These first three songs blend seamlessly into one another, a technique better integrated here than on Construction Time, and furthering the impression of a unified, cohesive work rather than merely a collection of songs, a concept album in tone and mood if not explicitly in subject matter.

If there's a flaw to the proceedings it crops up early and it's an arguable one: there's too much Gore here. Four lead vocals, three in a similar glacial tempo and another song ("Black Dress") that sounds like he'd written it for himself rather than Dave is rather too many. Gore's voice isn't without its charms but I've always thought of him as I used to Noel Gallagher; you don't mind him wandering out with the acoustic for a couple of numbers while you pop out for a piss, but he's ultimately pulling attention from the main attraction. "Sometimes" is a pretty piano ballad, a "Somebody" redux under heavy delay effects, but sticking it and "It Doesn't Matter Two" back-to-back on side one drops a little momentum from the proceedings, although "A Question Of Time" restores it with a vengeance.

Indeed, It's essentially an album of two halves, divided equally and starkly between heavy, aggressive mid-tempo epics versus softer ballads. In the former category, the aforementioned title track stands up as an classic along with "Fly" and the pounding, brutal "A Question Of Time". Straddling the difference is the criminally under-appreciated "Here Is The House", showcasing a warm, understated Gahan vocal set to the metronome of a ticking clock and a winning arpeggiated lead melody, while "Stripped" is perhaps the enduring classic and the emotional center of the record. The lead-off single from the album, it's a cinematic production, opening with a rhythmic, treated sample of a motorcycle engine and a single held low note that's soon joined by layered metallic synths and Gahan's plea for human connection over industry and technology. Gore joins in the harmonies and backing vocals, an approach frequently employed but rarely better than here, and the terrific middle eight opens things up into widescreen. Inexplicably ignored in the band's most recent "Best of" compilation, which is absolutely unforgivable, it remains one of the band's finest moments.  A retreat in intensity follows, with Gore returning for "World Full Of Nothing", whose pretty melody belies the song's nihilism, while "Dressed In Black" is probably the weakest track on the album, with a lyric that veers dangerously close to cliche and a subject which Gore would revisit more personally and successfully on Violator's "Blue Dress". "New Dress" closes out proceedings with a rare and final return to social commentary, a heavily processed Gahan buried in the mix, quoting newspaper headlines over distorted drums and clattering percussion, and, after the darkness of the rest of the album, a song that makes an effort to acknowledge at least the possibility of change.

The remixes and 12-inch extra tracks came thick and fast - by the third single – a heavily remixed "A Question Of Time" – live tracks from the Black Celebration Tour were beginning to show up. Only two new b-sides (outside of a couple of radical deconstructions of existing tracks) would appear in this period, the dark instrumental "Christmas Island", and "But Not Tonight", which would flip places with "Stripped" as the A-side of the US version of this single owing to its inclusion on the soundtrack of lost 80s shitfest "Modern Girls". The band (or at least Wilder, if memory serves) apparently disliked the latter track, tossed off in a single day, intensely, rejecting it as too pop, but I've always had a very soft spot for it, particularly in extended form, and thematically it's consistent with the album even if the production is a little simpler and the mood a touch lighter. On the remixes side, Flood's "Highland Mix" of "Stripped" is an absolute monster, giving the song room to breathe in an expansion that formed the basis of the live version for years to come.

The cover art was the strongest T&CP effort to date, a matte none-more-black affair with embossed icons running down the outer columns and a spot-glossed photo (Brian Griffin's last for the band) featuring flowers set against an ominous glass tower block. Simple typography and a new DM icon is set simply across a red and yellow bar at the top. A caption on the back reads, despairingly, "Life in the so-called space age". It's bleak and beautiful, a post-modern gothic affair that perfectly captures the mood, as dark as Depeche Mode would ever get, yet lightened with moments of beauty.

Mood music in its truest form, there are probably fewer tracks on Black Celebration beyond the title track and singles that I'd think of playing alone versus its predecessors, and some songs that, taken exclusively on their own merits seem somewhat slight, but like The Cure's Disintegration it works brilliantly as a single cohesive piece, and stands among Depeche Mode's finest hours close to a quarter-century (Christ, old, etc) on. They'd be better than this. But only twice.

Below, "Black Celebration" live on The Tube in 1986, and "New Dress" and "Stripped" live in concert on the Black Celebration Tour. Pardon the 80s graphics on the latter, although it's got bugger all to do with me.

Morning Commute: Depeche Mode - Some Great Reward

(I understand it's all gone a bit Depeche around here, but we're nearly halfway there...)

1984's Some Great Reward saw Depeche Mode come of age with an album that, while it represented for the first time more a consolidation than a revolution, is nonetheless a significant step forward in terms of the quality and sophistication of composition, production and performance from Construction Time Again, released almost exactly 12 months prior. It broke the band in the States with inescapable hit single/albatross "People Are People", while in the UK the post synthpop Mode had established its style sufficiently for one Neil Tennant in Smash Hits to review "Blasphemous Rumours" as "a routine slab of gloom..."

It's immediately obvious the band have now mastered their sampler instruction manuals, with sounds being constructed around the songs as opposed to vice versa, and a greater layering and manipulation of sundry metallic noises. The drums in particular are remarkable, a combination of traditional drum machine and found sound, with a power immediately apparent as "Something To Do" kicks things off to thunderous effect. And there's something else new: Martin Gore has apparently discovered fucking, and he's keen to discuss it, and to compare it to other things. The same man wibbling about having "never been in love before" two short years ago would now like you to put your leather boots on. And your pretty dress. He wants to play Master & Servant. And have you "lie with him". All of this would sound, frankly, hilarious coming directly from the wee man himself, but Gahan's slowly developing the charisma and authority to carry it off (if mildly hindered by a truly preposterous feathered mullet), even if it all sounded just a little safe and sanitized next to some of the band's more lurid contemporaries.

Key to the power of the album is a notable darkening of the musical mood to accompany this newfound fascination. "Something To Do" finds an escape from the mundanity of workaday drudgery in sex with an aggressive edge that's not a million miles away from the EBM genre that was beginning to emerge in Europe. "Lie To Me" continues the lyrical theme, rejecting the dishonesty of communication in favor of the physical, all set to a mid-tempo, throbbing bassline and a sinewy, twisting melody, while "Master & Servant" ups the ante, juxtaposing bedroom S&M against everyday exploitation with a thumping, snareless drumbeat and inadvertently hilarious whips'n'moans.

Gore's vocal contributions are their strongest to date with two relatively straightforward love songs, of which one would rightly achieve classic status as a signature song. "Somebody" is still charmingly simple and affecting – Gore's plaintive lyric, sung without undue melodrama against Alan Wilder's piano with a sample of playground noises in the back throwing things just ever so slightly off-kilter. Wilder makes a final songwriting contribution to a Depeche album (he'd continue to occasionally throw in the odd b-side), with "If You Want", which starts in a dirge-like monotone with another indictment of the working week before slamming into a pounding, downbeat barnstormer that worked particularly well in concert, providing Gahan a pulsing backdrop for microphone stand juggling and complicated shouting.

The most complete Depeche Mode performance to date is saved for last. "Blasphemous Rumours" sets Gore's accusation of a malicious God to a song that slips between troubled, whispered verses and a brilliant, spiralling chorus. The production is complex and sympathetic; the pings of a life support machine, the sampled breathing that invokes the sound of a respirator and a brief third-verse counter-melody seemingly based on "Jesus' Love Is Very Wonderful" are all directly inspired by the lyric, while monolithic drumming and clattering samples (of, admittedly, a saucepan coming down the stairs) add to the oppressive atmosphere. It's a classic, if unlikely single (it was perhaps a hedging of bets that found it paired as a double A-side with "Somebody"). The band themselves seem to understand what's been achieved as the usual couple of extended remixes were dispensed with – the 12-inch and album version are essentially the 7-inch mix with no alteration, save for a simple 60 second instrumental coda that continues the breath samples to a repeated sequencer motif.

Nothing much to add from a b-sides and 12 inches standpoint - Alan Wilder's "In Your Memory" from "People Are People" is a solid outing, as is an Adrian Sherwood/On U-Sound remix of the A-side, and it's worth noting that this is where the multi-format years began in earnest, with (very) limited 12-inches for "People Are People" and "Master & Servant", a US-only "Black & Blue Version" remix for the latter, and a limited four-track 7-inch for "Blasphemous Rumours/Somebody".

Arguably the band's first classic then, although listening to it now I'd say Construction Time gives it a solid run for its money, and 1986's Black Celebration finds the band taking the basic style to its greatest success just prior to the imperial phase of the late eighties/early nineties. These days the live setlists tend to stick to the five-new-album-cuts-plus-the-singles plan, but "Something To Do" and "If You Want" have as solid an argument for inclusion as anything else in the catalog (the latter hasn't been played since 1984), and Some Great Reward stands up well as a whole. Obligatory artwork mention - a striking cover photo of a bride and groom set against an industrial landscape rounds out the band's trio of industrial covers, while on the back cover T&CP introduced the first of a number of nearly infinite "DM" logos and assorted iconography that would make repeatedly having to re-decorate your schoolbooks a bit of a slog, to be honest.

Below, "If You Want" from the 1985 video "The World We Live In And Live In Hamburg", criminally unavailable on DVD, and never released in full in the US, where Sire inexplicably cut about 40 percent off the runtime. Bottom, Alan Wilder makes a surprise appearance at this year's Teenage Cancer Trust gig, playing "Somebody", playing with the band for the first time in 16 years, and probably the last.

Morning Commute: Depeche Mode - Construction Time Again

The great leap forward. 1983 saw Depeche Mode start the year with non-album single "Get The Balance Right!", a song that essentially consolidated the stronger elements of the Broken Frame sound. Seven months later, they'd release an album that bore almost no resemblance to it.

Construction Time Again saw the band overhauling their sound, replacing the traditional warm analog synthpop with a sampler-based approach that owes a well-documented debt to the industrial sound German power tool botherers  Einstürzende Neubauten had pioneered, although the full evolution of that aesthetic would only appear on 1984's Some Great Reward. Here it's still emerging, the band halfway through the "Welcome to Synclavier" manual and still clearly figuring out how to exploit found sound and the power of the sampler. The result is amusingly twee in places - there's a repeated sound in "Pipeline" that's clearly someone dropping a ping-pong ball for example, and several songs lean a little heavily on a synthesized brass section that would inform the band's sound across the mid 80s (get yourself a couple of sheets of corrugated iron, a hammer, the ping-pong ball and a trumpet, you're halfway to the tribute band), but the overall sound is nonetheless significantly beefed up from A Broken Frame, not least the drums, which have a power and authority here missing from prior work. Some of this sonic improvement is probably due to the promotion of Alan Wilder from tour keyboardist to full band member; certainly Wilder's studio contributions would go on to be recognized as critical to DM's sound.

Lyrically too there's a significant step forward from Martin Gore (and Wilder, who contributed two tracks and a b-side to the period). The same band who a year earlier were questioning the definition of love in the naffest music video ever filmed now brusquely dismiss the concept in the first three minutes of the album as "Not enough/In Itself", and, suitably cowed, Love fucks off out of it for the remaining eight songs. The rest of the album finds the band at its most political, with lyrics covering such weighty subjects as environmentalism, capitalist greed and nuclear war, albeit in a fashion that wasn't likely to give Gang of Four or Crass any sleepless nights.

It's a consistently strong effort with very few dips in quality and a sound that's more aggressive than you remember. Opener "Love, In Itself" is one of the band's more forgettable singles, but it fades immediately into "More Than A Party" which immediately establishes this new bolder terrain. Gahan's voice, while yet to achieve the stentorian timbre it would in later years, is far more confident than before, matched by the assault of a heavier beat and more complex layers of instrumentation. "Pipeline" sees Gore take lead vocal on the most overtly industrial song on the album (and a bit of a dirge, let's be honest), and then it's the peerless "Everything Counts", a song that was still being employed as an encore nearly 25 years later on the Playing The Angel tour. It's still a very odd hit single, this mix of industrial samples, melodia, xylophone and shawm backing a lyric about corporate greed and music business exploitation. Even the single cover art showed a determined break with the past, with a rough crayon sketch of a worker with a hammer (a theme reprised on T&CP's terrific  album art), while a switch of music video directors suggested the band would no longer be appearing with small children and teddy bears, thank Christ.

On the second side, the frantic "Told You So" is the most obvious signpost to the more complete synthesis of the pop-Neubauten sound of the following year's Some Great Reward, while two rare Wilder compositions qualify as minor classics. The nuclear themed "Two Minute Warning" could easily have been a third single, with a bridge lyric "No sex/No consequence/No sympathy" that showcases the sterner face of the new Mode, while "The Landscape Is Changing" pairs an ahead-of-its-time if completely naïve treatise on pollution to a terrific minor key melody and a great vocal from Gahan. Wilder's "official" (everything from this point on really should be credited Gore/Wilder given the man's programming and arrangement contributions) songwriting contributions would peak here; he'd offer "If You Want" and a couple of b-sides the following year and that'd be it; a shame, given the obvious talent. His "Love, In Itself" b-side "Fools", one of my favorite songs of the Construction Time era, is also worth tracking down in both long and short versions; it would have fit very well on the album proper.

The first Depeche Mode album with quality from start to finish, and the definition of a transitional  album; next year's Some Great Reward is arguably the band's first classic, and the birth of the modern Mode sound.

Below, "More Than A Party" live in Birmingham in '83. Much of the concert appears to be up on YouTube, albeit in this quality. As the sound takes a leap forward, so to is Gahan's stage persona;  the polite plaid-clad bopping chappy of years past is suddenly making with the bum wiggle and the "OHHHAYAYAYOEEEAEAHAHHH"s. Below that, "Everything Counts" live in 2006.

Morning Commute: Depeche Mode - A Broken Frame

1982 saw Depeche Mode release their sophomore album without the aid of primary songwriter Vince Clarke, who fucked off out of it claiming his lack of comfort with success, then immediately formed the highly successful Yazoo followed by the profoundly successful Erasure. DM responded by giving the pen to Martin Gore, roping in Alan Wilder on keyboards, saying yes to some of the most embarrassing publicity shoots ever committed to film, and releasing arguably their weakest album, although in fairness a) it's got its highlights and b) I'm tempted to look on it more favorably these days than the MOR snoozefest that was much of 2007's Exciter if for no other reason than the inexperience of all involved and the challenges with the lineup change.

A Broken Frame starts strongly. "Leave In Silence", released as the third and final single from the album, is perhaps the key transitional point from new romantic synthpop to darker fare, with a lyric that details the "emotional violence" of a dying relationship to the sound of a throbbing bassline and samples of breaking glass. The 12-inch "(Longer)" is the strongest version, bringing in the beats earlier with a lengthy intro and extending the coda with the sequencer set to glitch.

Further highlights include first single "See You", the chart success of which must have greatly reassured a band whose final communication with the departing Clarke was apparently to tell him to stick his proffered "Only You" directly up his arse. Slowing the tempo, it's a pretty ballad with Beach Boys harmonies, and it holds up well today, unlike middle single "The Meaning Of Love", which is, let's be honest here, fucking terrible lyrically and horribly twee melodically, although the whole thing's worth it for the 12-inch "Fairly Odd Mix", which sees someone actually ask mid-song "What do you want to do then?" The answer, apparently, is start fucking about with controls on the mixing desk seemingly at random, which is still a better approach that the efforts of most of the band's 90s guest remixers.

The album overall is a mildly schizophrenic affair, with the lightweight pop of "The Meaning Of Love" and "A Photograph Of You" sitting next to a series of self-conscious efforts to add depth and meaning. Much of the rest of this latter strategy, unfortunately, combines hapless sixth-form lyrical stylings with a collection of music that would have been stronger for the presence of anything resembling a melody. (The lyrics aren't helped by the memory of the lyrics on the inner sleeve being embellished with inexplicable exclamation marks. There's something about the punctuation that doesn't help a lyric that's already handicapped by going "My Secret Garden's Not! So Secret! Anymore!"). Chief offenders here are "Monument", "Shouldn't Have Done That!" and "Satellite", all of which are trying nobly for a depth conspicuously absent in "Boys Say Go!", but with very limited success. The music, meanwhile, strongly suggests that all the good synth presets had already been used and the group were struggling with the second bank of shitty FX and ersatz woodwinds. There's a sense that Gore, rapidly pressed into service as songwriter and lyricist, was probably exhausting his limited repertoire, a theory reinforced by the fact that two of the three single b-sides are instrumentals (and one of those simply a faster discofied version of "My Secret Garden").

The more somber approach isn't without its successes however - the aforementioned "Leave In Silence" for one, and it throws up one genuine lost classic. Closer "The Sun & The Rainfall" could easily have held its own on any of Depeche's 80s albums, and is surely the only song on the album beyond "Leave In Silence" that could feasibly be performed live today (Alan Wilder apparently tried to include it in the set-list on one of the Faith & Devotion tours but was voted down). It's a terrific song, a mid-tempo piece with thumping drums that point the way forward to Construction Time, and a great chorus that drops slowly out into an extended fade of layered vocals and counter melodies.

The album as a whole has dated significantly, but it's still a fascinating document of a band struggling to reinvent itself when all and sundry had written it off, and clues to the band's eventual style are clearly evident in retrospect. The group themselves rapidly accepted the album as transitional – by the time of the '84 world tour "See You" and "Leave In Silence" would be the sole representatives in the setlist. Finally, it's worth pointing out the classic cover design from Town & Country Planning, responsible for the band's visual identity until the Anton Corbijn Institute of Fingerpainting took over in the early 90s. Depeche would revisit this classic industrialist/worker imagery a year later, when the lyrical content caught up to the theme.

Below, horrible quality I know, but the only live version of "The Sun & The Rainfall" I've been able to track down, live at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1982. Most of this gig (or the same venue on the same tour) ended up as extra tracks on what were originally German import 12-inch single "Mini Albums" for "Get The Balance Right", "Everything Counts" and "Love, In Itself" in 1983. Below that, an amazingly high quality contemporary clip of "See You" on The Tube - one for the synth porn crew with a PPG Wave 2 and Jupiter 8 in the spotlight, as well as what appears to be a 12-year-old Dave Gahan with a classic case of negative sideburns.

Morning Commute: Depeche Mode - Speak & Spell

The first Depeche Mode album remains a curious artifact in many ways - the band would move swiftly on from the classic synthpop sound and most of these songs would see their final appearances live within a couple of years, while the record itself mixes the incredibly twee, some brilliantly daft lyrics and three or four classics together with a few pointers to the future sounds of both the band and Vince Clarke.

Taking on its musical merits alone it stands up well, if clearly of its time. The two singles are essential – "New Life" bounces along infectiously if incomprehensibly ("I stand still stepping on the shady street and I watch that man to a stranger") while "Just Can't Get Enough" is still the archetypal synthpop moment at 29 years old. "Photographic" is the only song here that still makes the occasional live performance, albeit in a more aggressive version that's closer to the one featured on the Some Bizzare Album compilation that preceded the band's signing to Mute. "Puppets" pairs a terrific synth hook with a darker sound that points the way toward the following year's A Broken Frame, and "Nodisco" could almost be the first Erasure single some four years ahead of the birth of the band itself.

On the weaker side, "Big Muff" may be the world's least essential instrumental, I Sometimes Wish I Was Dead belies its Kurt Cobain title with a main synth riff that makes "The Meaning Of Love" sound like Slayer's "Reign In Blood", and "What's Your Name" pairs call-and-response vocals in very poor cod Beach Boys American accents with a lyric that Scissor Sisters would reject as excessively fey. Of a piece with "Boys Say Go!" (see below), I think it's unlikely to show up on a setlist at this point, although it would have been fucking hysterical to see it tackled in '94-'95 during Dave Gahan's full-on smacked-up rock god phase. [UPDATE: Incredibly, they were still performing it as late as 1986 on the Black Celebration tour...]

The 1988 Mute CD reissue adds five tracks (inexplicably relegated to the DVD on the more recent deluxe edition) including two of the strongest of the period. "Shout", originally the b-side of "New Life", is all buried vocals and clanging percussion, a primitive precursor of the sampled industrial clatter that the band would embrace three years later, while "Dreaming of Me" b-side "Ice Machine" is retrospectively a minimal electro classic, four minutes of swirling synth pads, metronomic percussion and utterly incomprehensible lyrics that wouldn't be out of place on Wierd's recent Cold Waves & Minimal Electronics collection.

Below, a live take from 1981 on "Boys Say Go!", which manages to pack more homoeroticism into three short minutes than Erasure have thus far managed over an entire 25 year career.

Random YouTube Friday: Depeche Mode

Not sure how I missed this last year, but here's DM performing "Personal Jesus" on Later With Jools Holland. Avoid the comments section, wherein various twats suggest that the original, variously attributed to Johnny Cash or Marilyn Manson, was better.

Die Modenalbum

Priceless.

Review: Depeche Mode - Sounds Of The Universe

The signs were promising. Fletch telling the press the band had so many songs they'd had to shove the extra ones on the deluxe edition, Martin raiding eBay for vintage analog gear, Dave continuing to contribute songs - actually co-writing one with Gore for the first time.

The title was promising - a seemingly deliberately excessive pun on 1987's classic Music For The Masses suggesting an ambitious project was in the offing.

The preview was promising. An absolutely storming first single, "Wrong" mixes an amusing lyric with a great Gahan vocal, concert-designed shouty chorus bits and atonal synth burps and metallic clanks straight out of an Emulator II.

The beginning is promising. "In Chains" starts with the sound of half a dozen vintage pieces of kit firing up - an electronic orchestra tuning before a performance. As the cacophony fades away, Gahan slips into the picture with a vocal that recalls Songs Of Faith And Devotion's "Higher Love" - not the last time on this album your memory is jogged by a sound or a mood from an earlier work.

Yet, four or five high points aside, the album slips by over the course of the next 50 mid-tempo minutes with surprisingly little impact. The most striking first impression is that, while the band has apparently secured the songs, the equipment and the services of Anton Corbijn (phoning in the album cover design once again - stick to the photos, Anton), they've forgotten to pack the tunes.

Too much of Songs Of The Universe slips by like the least memorable songs off the second halves of Playing The Angel and Exciter. It's competent but monochromatic and uninventive; echoes of earlier, better efforts undermining some songs (Gore's only solo vocal effort, "Jezebel", is Violator's "Blue Dress" with little emotion and even less melody); and a paint-by-numbers approach harming others ("Corrupt" is "A Question Of Time" plus "Halo" minus tunes, "Come Back" is perhaps the epitome of generic late-period Depeche). The decision to keep producer Ben Hillier in tow for the second album in a row hasn't helped - eBay synth mania notwithstanding, this is essentially Playing The Angel part two - sonically vastly less interesting than Gahan's last solo effort, and a pale aural shadow of the Wilder years.

The principal problem appears to be something of an autopilot approach. The hope that Gahan contributing songs would add a new dimension to the band hasn't happened, mainly because he seems to keep his innovation for his solo efforts, furnishing DM with songs written in a very DM style. You used to be able to rely on at least one experiment per album, from the acapella lust of "I Want You Now" to the gospel pleading of "Condemnation" or the industrial grind of "Barrel of a Gun." And Martin Gore's vocal contributions used to be something more than tuneless melodrama - I can't think of a classic Gore-sung song since 1994's "Judas."

That's not to say the album is a disaster by any means. Both songwriters are lyrically inventive, even if the prevailing tone still seems to be rehab-influenced, a subject that Gore, now an ex-drinker himself, appears to have embraced as well as Gahan. Gahan's voice continues to improve with age, subtler in approach and richer in character. And there are some knockout songs - "Wrong", present here in identical form to the single, is the highest energy DM single since "I Feel You" and probably the best for a decade. "In Chains" is perhaps a minute too long, but a great first track with percussion reminiscent of 1984's Some Great Reward and an obvious gig opener; the moment at 3:35 after the middle-eight when the percussion drops back in is an album highlight.

"Fragile Tension" and "In Sympathy" are both terrific, the former a spiritual cousin to Violator's "Waiting For The Night" and the latter sporting one of the album's few traditional choruses, sung jointly by Gahan and Gore. "Peace" starts out like "See You" before suddenly taking a left turn into Wild-era Erasure, and "Hole To Feed" sees Gahan reach equal status as a songwriting partner, a great lyric married to an aggressive, percussive beat.

A competent effort then (and most of this stuff will slip seamlessly into the live experience), but ultimately a slightly undistinguished and conservative one. I must be getting old - this must be how it would have felt as a Stones fan when faced with Steel Wheels. You don't want the band to forget who they are and release a total and complete fucking shitpile on the order of, say, The Cure's self-titled 2004 abomination, but a willingness to take some risks and play with the form a little more would be welcome; perhaps the band needs a more adventurous producer to help rediscover their muse. Review forthcoming for the elaborate box set, which includes several extra tracks, remixes and a disc full of career-spanning demos, but for now, Must Try Harder: 7/10.

DM - Come Back (Live In Studio)

Live-in-studio preview of "Come Back" off the new album. Much-touted analog synth vibe in evidence here. Fletch still doing a good job of pretending to play synth. Can I just geekily point out that Martin and Dave are both wearing Grado SR-60's? I can? Oh goody.

New DM Video

Official video for new single "Wrong", a song it's increasingly clear has been scientifically engineered to provoke a shoutalong crowd reaction when played live a la "Reach out and touch faith."

DM Premiere New Single At German Echo Awards

World premiere of "Wrong" sees a revitalized Depeche breaking out the Construction Time Again clanking metal and shouty vocals for the first time in years. Excellent first single - combines the stomp of "Personal Jesus" with a great lyric and an energetic (if gurning) Dave delivery. They haven't sounded this alive in some time.

Bodes well for the upcoming album, even if the cover looks like an 8-bit rendering of a Ker Plunk game. Excellent footage of Fletch picking a bit of fluff off the synthesizer he can't play at around 2:04.

Click the HQ button on the YouTube clip below to watch in high quality btw.

Mode Tracklisting

Depeche Mode have released the track-listing for the forthcoming, inelegantly titled Sounds of the Universe, out April 20th.

1. In Chains
2. Hole To Feed
3. Wrong 
4. Fragile Tension
5. Little Soul
6. In Sympathy
7. Peace
8. Come Back
9. Spacewalker
10. Perfect
11. Miles Away/The Truth Is
12. Jezebel
13. Corrupt

Album sounds promising* - produced by Ben Hillier, who oversaw 2005's Playing The Angel, easily DM's best album for a decade. Partly the fruits of Martin Gore's recent obsession with vintage analog gear, it's apparently more electronic than recent efforts, and, although no-one's released a song count, it sounds like Dave Gahan contributed more than a couple of tracks to the album - given the progress in his songwriting suggested by 2006's solo Hourglass, that's not bad news. Thirteen tracks in total; not clear whether that includes dodgy instrumental linking bits, but it presumably includes two of Martin Gore's increasingly histrionic lead vocals.

April 6th sees the release of first single, "Wrong", presumably followed by a punishingly long tour of the world's arenas. Hopefully this time without The Bravery shitting things up as hopelessly-out-of-depth opening band.

*Better than the latest logo, one hopes, which is poo.

Comedy Trousers

There's really fuck all to write about at the moment as we're a couple of weeks away from any new releases and I can't be arsed to trawl through the back catalog and come up with something pithy. By way of recompense, here's rare live footage of Depeche Mode, featuring Dave Gahan in the world's tallest pair of trousers, covering Bryan Ferry covering the Everly Brother's "The Price Of Love" in Amsterdam in 1981, a performance that Haircut 100 might reject as a little twee, and one that makes much of debut album Speak & Spell sound like Minor Threat by comparison. Ace.