1) Which song would you lose from the album?
2) Which song is the most radical on the album (he's using the vinyls as masters; I'll use the complete CDs with the bonus tracks, i.e. B-sides as the masters myself; although they won't be eligible for answering in #1)
3) Which song have you listened to the most?
4) What is your favorite song on the album at the moment?
5) How would you rate the album overall?
Black Celebration was the second Depeche Mode album I picked up, I think, about 1988 or so. It would have still been fairly newish, but not so new that Music For the Masses wasn't already out, because it was Strangelove specifically that brought me back to Depeche Mode in a big way. One could say that it makes a triptych of sorts with the albums Construction Time Again and Some Great Reward as the albums Gareth Jones produced, bringing his indie industrial methods to the band, which guys like Alan Wilder adopted and adapted readily and quickly, turning them into their own hallmark sounds. I rather tend to see it as the middle part of a triptych along with Some Great Reward and Music for the Masses as the mature, dark, aggressive electronic music sound that I associated with the band so strongly during the 80s.
It's a longer album than Some Great Reward; or rather, at least it has more tracks. It's arguably even more "artistic" if you will, with a number of songs that not only weren't ever going to be singles, they were even strange as album tracks or b-sides. Luckily, most of these experimental art tracks are short; but they actually add considerably to the album as a whole (with one exception, which I can't stand.)
The Black Celebration era is also notable for a number of non-album tracks of some note. Shake the Disease maybe doesn't quite have the right sound to fit on this album; it's certainly not dark enough to work. But, along with its b-side, Flexible, it featured prominently on the compilation Catching Up With Depeche Mode, and it is actually one of the boys' better tracks. Martin Gore said so as well, for whatever that's worth, and he regrets that it doesn't really fit in with the albums, because he thinks that it makes it unfortunately kind of not have a place, and get under-rated. He might be right, but they've done all that they can to promote the track even so; it usually plays in all of their live shows even now, for instance. The other single of this era was "It's Called a Heart" which the band didn't like, and many fans now consider it pretty forgettable too. It would have fit on the album even less well than Shake the Disease would have, although its b-side was Fly on the Windsceen, which was remixed and added as the second track.
But Not Tonight is another odd case. It isn't usually listed as one of the album tracks in rereleases, and is stuck in with the bonus tracks, but of course, I always had the US release (both in cassette tape and later CD) and it's just the last track on the album in the US. This is another one that the band themselves don't love, although they've gradually accepted that the fans seem to, and they've added it to some of their live sets in the last few years, at least, finally. In fact, curiously, I think the whole album works much better with it as the end, even though it has a different feel than the rest of the album. Black Celebration is on the whole so unrelentingly dark, that having this relatively lighter (but only relatively; if Erasure had done it, it wouldn't be considered light, for instance) it somehow seems like a cathartic coda to the album that the album needs in order to feel complete.
Of course, much of that is probably driven by the fact that I never heard the album without it and had no idea that it wasn't on the album in the UK until after I'd had the US release for years and listened to it hundreds if not thousands of times. With the deluxe edition re-release, the video documentary (which you used to be able to watch on Youtube, but now you can't seem to find it anywhere) Martin Gore paraphrased Daniel Miller, Mute's owner, as describing the album as: It's not good enough, there aren't any singles, and it'll never get played on the radio. Black Celebration has become a real cult classic, though, and it did have some successful singles after all, as well as being integral to building up a groundswell of sleeper fans in the US. I still think it stands alone as the best album, the most cohesive (even with But Not Tonight at the end!) and the one that feels the most like a solid piece of art. Of course, that doesn't mean that it's perfect: the weird ballads Sometimes and It Doesn't Matter Two are both strange; the former sounding like it's trying to be a remake (almost) of Somebody in a way. And the even stranger ballad Dressed in Black is just terrible and kind of embarrassing; it's a little hard to listen to. (A lot of the Martin Gore sung ballads are.) On the other hand, the strange ballad World Full of Nothing is brilliant and I consider it one of the stand-out tracks of the album.
The cover art is also a bit weird, and although I'm so used to it that it's hard for me to imagine anything else, I also have no idea what it's getting at, and apparently nobody from the band or the label ever really liked the piece that the photographer turned in either.
Anyway, on to the questions:
1) I would absolutely lose Dressed In Black. I really don't like that song at all. It has very little to redeem it other than at least it fits the tone of the rest of the album, I guess.
2) Stripped is the most radical, especially as it was released as a very unlikely single. The sampling is also just really strange; Dave Gahan's car starting is the opening of the song, a slowed down and treated sample of a motorcycle engine makes up the bassline, and sampled fireworks feature in the end of the song. It also features a single little strum on an acoustic guitar. Now, the band used a handful of guitars in Construction Time Again, but since they'd built their identity on being an electronic band, they had avidly avoided them for a long time too. Of course, I think they did kinda like them, and the producer on their next album kind of gave them the "go ahead" if you will to use them if they wanted to, and Music For the Masses has quite a bit of guitar in it, although it's often more subtle than you'd think, and for a while, I didn't actually recognize most of the uses of it, because it was kind of in the background. Now don't get me wrong; radical isn't a problem. Stripped is one of my favorite songs of all time, and certainly a standout on this album.
3) Which song have I listened to the most? I'm actually not sure. It's certainly either Stripped, Question of Time or But Not Tonight, but I don't know which of those three would really be in the lead.
4) But Not Tonight is my favorite song. It actually always probably was, although a few others give it at least a little bit of a challenge. This is odd because it's technically not part of the album, but again, because I have the US version and always have, it is as far as I'm concerned, because it is on my release, and it's not called out as a bonus track or anything even. I've long tried to wrangle down every remix of it I could find, but there weren't a lot (the Stripped maxi-single has an extended version.) However, the song has been covered a lot, and sometimes it sounds really different than the original in interesting ways. Scott Weiland's cover (lead singer for Stone Temple Pilots) in particular stands out as unique, although I'd wager that most of the covers are by synthpop artists that are at least in some degree similar to Depeche Mode in style (Jimmy Somerville, for instance, or Paradigm, or Elegant Machinery or Æon Rings.)
5) Ten out of ten. Along with Music For the Masses, it is the iconic Depeche Mode album.
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