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?
1984's Some Great Reward were when Depeche Mode really finally kinda evolved into the Depeche Mode everyone in the 80s thinks that they were. They were musically more mature, with an extremely unique sound; very dark, moody and often aggressive pop music made in many ways like industrial music was, except with pop song structure, and a string of hits that were a bit indie still in most respects. They were accessible, but not too accessible. While Depeche Mode of the first two or three albums were described as fresh-faced nice boys, I doubt anyone would say that about Depeche Mode of this era, with their kind of morally subversive hints at S&M and aggressive religious questioning, black leather and studs, and generally a much more "bad boy" approach.
It's funny, though—the exact same people who usually say that Some Great Reward is much more mature, also clearly point to teen angst as its primary overarching theme, and teen angst is... by definition... very immature. For many years, because I really liked the music, I made excuses and apologias for the themes, assuming that there must be a kind of allegorical vibe to the themes, and maybe there is. Martin Gore doesn't exactly go around discussing the meaning of his songs. But the more I think about it, the more I think that most likely the songs mean what they seem to mean, and the boys from Basildon just enjoyed being kinda bratty and rebellious. It wasn't mature, and in fact, thematically this particular album has aged poorly because of it; or rather, it doesn't mean very much to me anymore. Although I do still think that the music is brilliant, so there's that.
I still prefer Black Celebration and Music For the Masses, but this is the first Depeche Mode album that I really like. It still has lots of Alan Wilder's brilliant touches in the production (he also wrote a song on the album, as well as a B-side to People Are People). The themes, looking back at them now, seem kinda embarrassingly sophomoric. But it is what it is; when I was 17 or so back in the late 80s and very earliest 90s, I loved this album, and I still have a lot of nostalgia about it even so.
Anyway, to the questions:
1) This is actually a tough one. The album only has nine tracks, and they all kind of fit to create an almost symphonic whole, and this is probably the only of almost every DM album where there isn't one that I wish I could leave off. That said, I have to pick something, so either It Doesn't Matter or Stories of Old are the more forgettable of the tracks here. Of the two... urgh. Stories of Old, I guess. It's a toss-up.
2) Depeche Mode was consistently radical about a lot of things by this time. I think Blasphemous Rumours, especially as a single release, with it's really bizarre sounds, almost complete lack of percussion, etc. probably deserves the nod. Not because of the theme; as a Christian myself, I've seen people ask those kinds of questions routinely when they're twelve years old, and if at ten years older than that, they still think those are deep questions to doubt faith because of stuff like that, you're just spiritually and emotionally quite immature. But as an emotional and sonic achievement, the song is really something else.
3) I'm sure it's People Are People. Not only did I listen to it on the radio when it was new (although at the time, I wasn't paying nearly as much attention to music, so I didn't even know who it was) but I also had the fix-up compilation album People Are People too, and I had the 12" on vinyl pretty early. Plus, c'mon. It's really classic. I've never understood why the band themselves don't like this song very much and avoided playing it for years.
4) Curiously, Alan Wilder isn't well known as a song-writer; he penned two songs on the earlier album, one on this, and a few b-sides, at least some of which were instrumentals anyway. He doesn't even think of himself as much of a song writer. But for Some Great Reward, I think the one track he penned, If You Want, is my favorite, and it grew into my favorite fairly early.
To be fair, I don't listen to this stuff as much as I used to. It's been the better part of two decades since I really had loads of Depeche Mode in regular rotation, even though they were so pivotal to the formation of my taste in music in so many ways. So, I haven't necessarily changed the songs that I like best in a long time.
5) Nine out of ten. One of the best. I only mark it down because of the preponderance of embarrassingly juvenile themes and thinking that they were deep or something.
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