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?
Might as well keep this series moving. As you can probably surmise, given that I saw Violator as a step backwards from the high point at Black Celebration and Music For the Masses, I liked Songs of Faith and Devotion even less. Songs was even more of what I didn't like about Violator. It's curious, too—synthpop fans, which is what the genre has kind of been labeled in the years since, although it was always a European label that I never once heard in America until nearly the turn of the century, still really like Depeche Mode, and talk about them when a new album comes out, but Songs wasn't really a synthpop album at all, or even an electronic album, for that matter. Even on discogs, the album is listed as Alternative Rock before it's also given the label synthpop, which is kind of dubious.
With Violator, I saw Depeche Mode as the girlfriend you had where you were starting to have a rougher time and drift apart; but there was still enough that you had in common and that you loved about her that you had hope that you could still make it all work out. By Songs, I was convinced that Depeche Mode and I were inevitably breaking up. In the future, there would still be some stuff that the Mode would put out that I'd like well enough to not regret that I picked it up, and they did do a kind of "for old times sake" album of sorts in the form of Playing the Angel (which is when I finally and belatedly was able to see them in concert live), but nowadays when Depeche Mode puts something out, I'll listen to it on Spotify or YouTube or whatever, but it's like when you look up your ex girlfriend on Facebook and you have no sense at all of how she ended up like she did or what you once saw in her, because she isn't that person anymore. Depeche Mode is a bluesy alternative rock band that still makes a few nods here and there to their past as the electronic synthpop (I would have used the term New Wave, or maybe synth New Wave to keep them distinct from guys like U2 or The Alarm or The Church or whatever back in the 80s, but synthpop is the label that I've learned to retroactively apply to them).
And that's fine. Nobody's saying that Depeche Mode has to continually churn out the same style of album over and over again. I, for once, am glad that they didn't continue to try and stick with the Speak & Spell style for the last nearly forty years. But then again, when you evolve and change your style too much, you risk losing the fans who liked you because of the output you put out, not because they bought into some kind of cult of personality about you personally. And Depeche Mode were hardly cult of personality type people anyway; they kept a very private public profile up to this point, although when Dave Gahan nearly died from a heroin overdose following the devotional tour, Martin Gore was drunk all of the time and having seizures, Fletch had to bail on the tour due to depression and/or anxiety or other mental health issues, and Wilder split with the band in disgust afterwards, they were even less likely to be nominated for cult of personality status. The Devotional tour was called by Q magazine "the most debauched rock'n'roll tour ever." After this, Gahan became very open about personal issues, and whatever chance their could ever be a cult of personality about the band was ruined for good—curiously, with the exception of Alan Wilder, who in retrospect is often seen as the true genius of the band (although he readily admits that without Gore's songs, he wouldn't personally have had anything much to work with, and Wilder wasn't really a fan of his own songwriting) as well as the emotionally stable, mature, and sane one of the group. Hardly anyone talks about Depeche Mode these days without wistfully hoping that somehow Alan Wilder would be reconciled and come back; but at this point, as the principles are sixty years old, or at least almost so, the chance that such a reunion would be of much interest to me other than as an academic curiosity is pretty low. And I think it's not of any interest to Wilder, or the rest of the band either, for that matter.
That said, despite my personal opinion on the album, Songs is one of the most popular ones, and seen, along with Violator, by most fans as part of the Golden Age of Depeche Mode, who are, I guess, in their minds a kind of grungy/bluesy electronic act of the 90s instead of a very slick electronic New Wave act of the 80s, which is how I see them. And that's the Depeche Mode I liked, especially the darker, heavier, angsty stuff of the second half of the decade, although I do have a fondness for the lighter, bouncier pop stuff of the first half too. To the extent that Depeche Mode isn't doing that kind of stuff anymore, they're not really a band that I'm nearly as interested in anymore. I tend to like bands that sound more Depeche Mode than Depeche Mode does nowadays, if I'm looking into synthpop; stuff like some of the later Camouflage releases, or what Mesh and De/Vision have put out. I don't think that they're as good as Depeche Mode at their peak, but they're better than Depeche Mode now, certainly.
All that said, Songs isn't a complete disaster. It does have some songs that I like. I Feel You is pretty good, as is Mercy In You, Judas, In Your Room, and Rush. Walking in My Shoes and Higher Love are OK, although they tend to sound like rather bland album tracks from the Violator era, like Clean. One Caress is the terrible Martin Gore ballad that I really wish he'd stop trying to do, and I really dislike the odd gospel-influenced songs Condemnation and Get Right With Me. I know a lot of people really like Condemnation and say Gahan's vocals on that track are among the best he ever recorded, but they were wasted on a song that really doesn't sound at all like the kind of song that fits on this album, or in this band's repertoire at all, for that matter. I almost prefer the incredibly awkward Gore ballads to either of these tracks, especially since Condemnation had a single release and is therefore a regular part of their live sets in the years since this release.
All in all, Songs is a product of its time; even someone like Depeche Mode who's a pillar of electronic New Wave had to basically sound like a grunge act. Truly, the 90s were a wasteland of pop culture in Western Civilization, and the embrace of grunge and the deep-sixing of almost anyone who'd been anybody in pop culture in the 80s unless they sold out and became grungy themselves made the time an absolutely terrible one for fans of music, of fashion, of movies and television (aside from a few blockbusters like the original Jurassic Park), etc. I'd blame Bill Clinton, but even he was just a symptom of the times, not its cause. The occasional bursts of bright spots in pop culture were often in the underground scene, or they were unusual new acts like Garbage, who managed to rise above their genesis to actually be really good, or they were outside of the coastal pop culture matrix and tied with Nashville or something else instead. There's a reason why Garth Brooks became such a huge star in this era, even though he wasn't any better than 80s country artists like Randy Travis or George Strait. His timing was good; he hit during a pop culture nadir.
Since I obviously don't feel any nostalgia for 90s pop culture, Songs of Faith and Devotion being both a product of a time that I dislike, and very reflective of that time in general, as well as being an experiment with very odd directions that don't fit at all, like gospel music and choirs, is obviously not one of my favorite DM albums. I like it less than I like Violator, but I still like it better than most of what followed, so I guess there's still that. (Alan Wilder's influence was sorely missed on the next two, at least, if not on everything since.) The biggest disconnect I have with it, though, is that it changed much too much. Depeche Mode were trying to be a different kind of band than the one I fell in love with in the 80s, and while they may well have been very good at being that kind of band, it's not the style of band that I was ever going to like as much as the kind of band that they had been previously. And I suppose that's no knock on them or their direction or this album in particular, just an admission that we were becoming incompatible, and this is the album that made me realize it (I didn't even buy it for years, although my brother had it, so I had access to it without buying my own copy. On the other hand, I had Music For the Masses and Black Celebration on both cassette tape and CD before I even bought Violator. Which I did rush out and buy right away, to be fair.)
Although aside from how Songs drifted away from my tastes and what I was likely to like, it's also notable that the recording session was particularly difficult, the tour was a catastrophe for the band members personally, and the band very nearly tore itself apart because of this album and its related support activities. Wilder quit. Gahan practically died. Gore and Fletch were significantly mentally and emotionally broken. Given that, maybe it's no surprise that I liked most of the output of the band after Songs even less than I liked Songs.
1) Condemnation. It's my least favorite. Although Get Right With Me and One Caress are nearly as loseable. I don't like any of the three, and struggle to not skip them. In fact, I'm less likely to even try to not skip them now, as I get older. I just don't care to listen to songs I don't like very much anymore.
2) Condemnation and Get Right With Me were radical relative to the band's output of the past, and not in a good way, but copying elements from a long established unrelated genre isn't really a radical thing to do in and of itself. I actually think In Your Room maybe the most radical, as it's the darkest song Depeche Mode did since Blasphemous Rumours in some ways. It really raised the bar. That said, going that direction isn't really radical, is it? I don't know. I'm not sure that I like this question all that much the more I've entertained it across multiple albums. Being radical isn't really all that important in its own right, and the radicalness of Depeche Mode was usually best described at the album level rather than the song level anyway.
3) Nothing on this album has been listened to by me as much as pretty much anything on any prior album. I'd say almost certainly that I'd give about equal times listening to I Feel You, Mercy In You, In Your Room and Rush. Rush maybe gets a slight nod, as in some ways, it's the most accessible of the tracks on this album to fans of the previous albums.
4) In Your Room is the best song, in my opinion.
5) Five out of ten. Notably and noticeably lesser than the seven ranked albums I've had before, and very disappointing compared to the nine and ten ranked albums. Although—spoiler alert—as I said, it's still better than most of what they've done since. Not all of it, but most of it. I'm not going to have a lot of higher scores as this series comes to its end, and because I dislike the later albums so much compared to the earlier albums, this whole series might slow down considerably. I've already done all of the ones that were fun to write about. Now come the ones that came out after I'd already considered myself "broken up" with Depeche Mode, and while although I did eventually get all of those albums, I haven't even listened to many of them all that many times, honestly. At least not relatively speaking.
I will say, though, that in today's climate, it's harder to listen to albums. I tend to get songs, and I get so many of them, and buying an entire album and listening to it over and over again until I can sing the entire thing word for word is a thing of the past. It's been many years since I felt I could do that with just about anything anymore. So although I do still pick up albums sometimes, I usually just rip them to my phone and don't really listen to them in order anymore anyway.
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