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.

Review: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

New York's appallingly monikered The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart's debut is an evocative, sparkling combination of early My Bloody Valentine fuzz, Stone Roses jangle, new wave melody and the sort of fey, Anglophile lead vocal that you rarely hear come out of the US any more outside of a late night Rocky Horror showing. It's 35 minute fever dream of adolescence, ploughing a late 80s furrow superficially similar to M83's "Graveyard Girl" and "Kim & Jessie" but with revved up guitars, propulsive bass and a little less calculation, the sound of every euphoric 3am first kiss you ever had.  One assumes Sophia Coppola's licensed the entire thing already.

There's a darkness and a melancholy in the lyrics that acts as a subtle undertow beneath some of the purest, giddiest pop in ages. "A Teenager In Love" takes a Prefab Sprout/Aztec Camera acoustic guitar riff, sprinkles a little synth over the top, and whispers a lyric that on closer examination tells the story of a teenager in love "with Christ and heroin." The overall effect is Less Than Zero reimagined by John Hughes.

Elsewhere, highlights include "Saturday Comes," a pean to the joys of infatuation and isolation, of staying locked away from everyone in "a wasted summer/with no drama." The splendidly titled "Young Adult Friction" is all fumbling in the library - "our bodies spent/among the dust and the microfiche." Synth player Peggy Wang's fragile harmonies twist in and out of Kip Berman's lead particularly effectively here.

"Stay Alive", the center of the record, starts out like a Stone Roses b-side — all thundering drums and acoustic guitar, until the synth bells and fuzzboxes herald a dreamlike, ambiguous lyric of surviving in a shithole. The Mary Chain drumbeat of closer "Gentle Sons" has a sense of the triumphant and the inevitable, a powerhouse closing to a brief, brilliant debut.

All killer, no filler. This is already being hyped into the stratosphere, but it's worth it. Spellbinding. 9/10.

Review: Franz Ferdinand Bring The Smuggery Back

Scotland's most successful clothes horses return with their third album. The hype on this suggested a great leap forward, a radical departure from the postpunk/angular/skinny-tied new wave of the first two efforts, but what actually appears to have occurred here is merely that someone picked up a Moog at some point, and the drummer's learned to lay off the high hats just a touch. The end result is very much old Franz Ferdinand in new electro flavor — well-packaged, reasonably catchy, shallow as a puddle of dog piss, and eventually a little boring.

I was rather hoping Franz Ferdinand had grown up a little in the three years since their second album, but they're still content to raise a well-plucked eyebrow archly from the corner rather than engage with the rest of us. Alex Kapranos comes across as the sort of louche fop who probably does quite well with his blazer slung rakishly over his shoulder at an upscale wine bar, but runs the danger of being glassed by someone’s lairy boyfriend down your local boozer. Even his hair is just a little fucking smug.

It's all well put together, if even you get the sense that the band is essentially recycling the same basic chorus to increasingly diminishing returns. There are a couple of stylistic steps forward - last year's single "Lucid Dreams" gets radically reworked as a slow, eight-minute electronic monster with a three minute electronic breakdown that's unlike anything they've done before. Lead-off track "Ulysses" is fun, if completely familiar; the brief banjo-inflected two minutes of "Twilight Omens" are particularly interesting; and "What You Came For" transcends its FF-by-the-numbers tendency with 40 seconds of highly unlikely frenzied guitar soloing right at the end. But there's no real emotion in sight until the last couple of tracks, which belatedly ditch the knowing smirks and the "Take Me Out" tempo for a slower, simpler and more direct approach. "Dream Again" is particularly charming - a simple lyric delivered in an atypically unaffected fashion and a relatively unadorned production, while "Katherine Kiss Me" sees Kapranos addressing the subject directly with lyrics adapted from the earlier "No You Girls" , backed by a simple fingerpicked acoustic guitar and piano. The sequencing undermines the songs however; after the lengthy instrumental coda of "Lucid Dreams" it feels like too little too late.

Here's the fundamental issue. I don't need Robert Smith histrionics or Richey Edwards 4-Realness all the time, and I don't particularly want Bloc Partyesque revelations about how Alex secretly wanted to take his trousers off with his mate down by the canal, but fewer camp chat-up lines and a little more emotion couldn't hurt. Kapranos fancies himself a raconteur in the Jarvis Cocker mould, but he's missing a little of the intelligence, much of the wit and damn near all the humanity. There were signs of the latter on songs like "Eleanor Put Your Boots On" off You Could Have It So Much Better, but there's precious little to be found here. What you end up with is amusing enough, decent background music, fun for the car or getting ready before a night on this piss, but plastic and ultimately pretty disposable. I'm going to take some shit for the following statement, but I'm not sure how this sort of thing deserves any more credibility than, say, Lily Allen, who's capable of being at least as amusing lyrically, has a better eye for detail, and doesn't come across as a self-absorbed, aloof twat.

I’m going to maintain, apparently unfashionably given the current frantic revisionism, that the second album remains the strongest. Tonight: is fun, but pretty slight, and who's really going to give a fuck in a year or two? 7/10.