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?
A little personal history before I get too far into this; I didn't really "get into" music until, oh, about 1986 or 1987 or so. I liked music, and I was picky about what I liked, but I mostly just listened to what was on the radio or MTV and didn't give a whole lot of thought to who I liked or why, just what songs I liked and why. The number of songs that I liked spread a wide gamut of what was more or less popular throughout the 70s and 80s, but it's curious that one of the first that really sticks out in my mind, because a good friend of mine and I both liked it, was "People Are People" back in 1984 or so when I was 12 years old. A year or two later, I was finally starting to pay attention to bands specifically, and my first favorite bands, who's backcatalog I went and collected, were a-ha and Duran Duran. Clearly, the 80s new wave and synthpop were where I was headed, but what I needed was something a little heavier; less of a pop-star lightweight. Duran Duran was actually much more artistic than their string of hits would suggest, and I was surprised (pleasantly) on picking up a-ha's albums (I had three at the time; Hunting High and Low, Scoundrel Days, and Stay on These Roads) that they were a bit more artistic and moody than I expected just based on hits I'd heard on the radio like "Take On Me."
I still wasn't completely sure what kind of music I really liked yet, though; I was just as likely to be into hair rock bands like Def Leppard or Bon Jovi at this point. This all changed when I first heard "Strangelove" on a slightly more edgy new wave station broadcasting out of Houston that we had access to in Bryan. I fairly quickly picked up Music For the Masses on cassette tape; it would have been in the first dozen that I bought, at least, and I listened to it over and over again, curiously, often while I was also reading Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time. Despite the fact that Depeche Mode was obviously a very modern band at the time, and probably in fact even much more ahead of their time than most other musicians working, it really fit with the Victorian Gothic horror vibe of Dracula shockingly well. (This may also explain why I liked Little 15 much more than I otherwise might have; it sounded even more Gothic, Victorian, and horror-sounding than anything else on the album.)
Anyway, I loved Music for the Masses. I still do; I see it as one of the best electronic music albums of all time ever released. It's possible that it's not exactly as innovative or artistic as Black Celebration, but maybe that's not exactly fair; it does have its share of strange tracks as well as stuff that had a lot of potential to be hits (and they were hits to a large degree too.)
One thing that Masses did, which Depeche Mode went on to do for most of their subsequent albums, at least for a while, and which many other synthpop artists imitated, was include these little codas, or extra hidden tracks, if you will; after a song ended, there was a kind of interesting little instrumental coda attached. Another odd thing that it did was it had a very long gap after Pimpf before it did this coda; several minutes on cassette tape, although it's less on the CD version.
I've never experienced Music For the Masses without the bonus tracks on side 2 of the cassette, or just later on the CD. To me, they are just part of the required tracklist on the album, and while having them separated by sides on the cassette made them stand apart from the rest of the album, no doubt, I still can't really consider them as not part of the album. This is both cool and yet also kind of odd, as they don't fit musically quite as well as the album tracks proper. Agent Orange is a spooky but not particularly exciting instrumental, then there are two "dub-like" remixes of songs from the main album, and then "Pleasure, Little Treasure", which is a b-side to "Never Let Me Down Again."
Curiously, I usually didn't much like Pleasure Little Treasure at first, thinking that the really big, hoaky guitar sounds didn't fit, but there is a mix on the maxi-single CD that I really enjoy a lot.
But the "album version", noting that it's not technically an album track, is not my favorite. I don't hate it, but it sounds like a b-side, not something that really fit. Noting that these bonus tracks really don't exactly fit with the rest of the album, I'm going to exclude them from eligibility as being the track that I'd remove; all four of them would be top candidates, but shouldn't really be considered, since according to the band itself, they're not part of the album anyway; they're bonus tracks!
Music For the Masses is also interesting in that it's the first time that Depeche Mode really embraced guitars again. They (hoaky guitars in Pleasure, Little Treasure excepted) kept them somewhat subtle; in fact, I didn't even recognize them for what they were at first—although that's because in many ways I was expecting them to be an electronic band, and I wasn't expecting guitars, so I just expected that it was some synthesizer sound that sounded like a guitar. It's very curious that when you watch, assuming you can still find it, the documentary Sometimes You Do Need Some New Jokes, you'll see that their new production partner, David Bascombe, had to give them permission to use guitars. The band kinda wanted to, but worried that because their brand was an electronic band, that it wouldn't fly. They were even more nervous about making them a much bigger part of their sound the next time they were in the studio for Violator, but given the success of that album, they decided to jump whole hog on the guitar thing. This isn't to say that they became a rock instead of electronic band overnight, but it is fair to say that Depeche Mode did gradually become... I dunno, actually not really an electronic band anymore, but a kind of unusual bluesy band that retained some legacy of their past as an electronic band. It's fair to say that this coincides with their fan base kinda losing steam when it comes to excitement about their offerings, but let's not get ahead of ourselves too much...
Anyway, I'll talk about the tracklist as I go through the questions, to some degree.
1) I would lose I Want You Now. It's pretty bad. The Martin Gore weird ballads are almost always the ones that I can do without, and this is certainly one of them that just doesn't work. I guess I can kinda sorta appreciate the willingness to do something different; but most of those experiments would have been better off not done, quite honestly, or at least not committed as album tracks. As an aside, there is an interesting Alan Wilder Reconstruction mix of this track that... I don't know that it "saves" it, but it works a little better, at least. The bootleg remix collections, Editing the Mode also showed how this song could have worked by adding this long piano intro that's actually quite good.
I used to think Pimpf was a loser too, but to be honest with you, the black and white video collection Strange convinced me otherwise, and ever since then, I've had a kind of odd appreciation for the track. Although, Martin Gore is really strange. I used to wonder if he was gay, but he's married to a woman; I think he's just really weird and beta, kinda how John Lennon was.
2) In some ways, Music For the Masses was not intended to be radical. The documentary (good luck finding it; I used to watch it on Youtube, but it's since been blocked due to copyright) Sometimes You Do Need Some New Jokes, it refers to Music for the Masses as almost a tribute to their fans, really—a kind of deliberate "this is where we are right now"; I dunno. I'm not 100% sure that that distinction is meaningful; but I find Music for the Masses as an album that polishes and perfects and expands on the work of Black Celebration moreso than one that goes a new direction, really. I wouldn't call it an innovative album. Black Celebration was the one that was innovative, and Music For the Masses in many respects explored the same place with a few new sounds, with a new producer, and maybe a somewhat new vibe, but still kind of the same place. That said, as Alan Wilder said, much of what they did this time around was influenced by his own listening to a lot of Phillip Glass and the minimalists; there's a lot of starting off with a theme, and then adding and layering more and more elements until you get a really rich crescendo near the end where everything is going at once. Perhaps the song that best encapsulates this is Behind the Wheel, and Alan compares it to those optical illusion pictures where you have a square staircase that goes up and yet somehow after running the four sides you're back where you started instead of at the top. It's also interesting, because if you listen specifically to Dave's voice, the melody is almost non-existent. It is only a couple of notes repeated, and Gore's backing track vocals actually are more like a melody.
It's another one where there's a single version that's significantly different than the album version, and the album version has a droning, dark menace that the single version lacks.
3) I've probably listened to Strangelove the most, although that's a tough call. It's possible that Never Let Me Down Again or Behind the Wheel are tracks that I've heard as often, though. I said this before on some of the earlier albums, but I usually tend to just listen to the album through, and if I skip around, it's mostly just to bypass I Want You Now. This was especially true for the years when I had this on cassette tape, but realistically, I still prefer to hear the album that way. The fact that many of the songs run together enhances this habit; without manually fading out the end of Never Let Me Down Again, for instance, there's a jarring jump at the end unless you just go straight to The Things You Said. This carries forward for many of the tracks (and it did so as well on Black Celebration, and there's a bit of it in their two earlier albums too here and there.) As the singles, where I had remixes of them, and worked them into DJ setlists when I was running dances, or what-have-you, those were certainly the ones I preferred the most because they were the ones people would know.
As an aside, Martin Gore's vocals on The Things You Said are among the last time I really liked one of his ballads. I don't like many of them. A curious thing, though—because I didn't really know much about the band other than the albums, at least until the internet came along later, I couldn't as easily detect things like who was singing; Martin and Dave would swap out more frequently than you'd think, and Martin almost always did backing vocals even when Dave sang, which meant that I didn't always know who was doing what, and the sound of Depeche Mode's voice was a jumble in my mind between the two of them. This seems odd to me now, as I find their voices very distinctive and easy to pick out from each other, but I didn't necessarily have this same ability back when this was the most recent DM album I you could get. Besides, Dave's voice has changed over time, and he didn't always sing in the same style from album to album.
4) That's another tough one. The three singles mentioned above are certainly contenders, and I think the only other ones that could possibly match them in terms of how much do I like them would be Sacred or Nothing. (Little 15 is too unusual to be a favorite, although I do like it a lot.) At this point, I'm not sure I have anything much to add other than that Strangelove has gotten a little tired to me over the years; I probably heard it maybe a few times too many, so it's not likely to be the one I pick (although in more recent years, it's kind of making a comeback, because I haven't listened to Depeche Mode day in and day out nearly as much as I used to when I was younger.) I'd probably pick Sacred; an unappreciated uptempo, even danceable track that was, luckily, on the 101 setlist, but which otherwise got very little attention from the band, in spite of its obvious appeal.
5) Ten out of ten. This is peak Depeche Mode. As I said above, they didn't necessarily move the needle from where they'd been at Black Celebration, but they further explored, in a way that didn't feel repetitive or derivative, the same territory. It feels like polishing something that wasn't broke rather than taking a new direction. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, because I'll continue to review the remainder of their albums (eventually) but even the megahits Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion, which tend to be many fans' favorites, were steps backwards in my opinion, from their peak here at Music for the Masses. In spite of the presence of DM's most iconic track(s?) Enjoy the Silence and maybe Personal Jesus, the albums overall don't live up to this standard, and the direction of being noisy and unpolished was not an improvement on where they were.
No comments:
Post a Comment