Depeche Mode Five Questions: Sounds of the Universe

2009's Sounds of the Universe was the first album after Playing the Angel, which means that we're now well into a new phase in Depeche Mode's history; one where they're a bit less experimental, and making sure that they hit the beats that their fans expect.  I'm surprised, or maybe not, that what I see now starting on this album, is attempting to retread the same place as Playing the Angel, but maybe a bit more tired and bored.  It has a similar sound to Angel, but overall, the song quality just isn't as good.  There's way too many filler and mediocre tracks, and way too few honestly good ones.

To be fair, there are a lot of tracks from this era, though.  The album itself has thirteen normal tracks, and there are five b-sides or bonus tracks that are also associated with the album, and appear on "complete" versions of it, such as the Deluxe boxed set version.  (It also has some "demo" stuff and more that are older tracks repackaged in different versions.  The Deluxe boxed set really is overkill.)

In that vein, the album doesn't offer much that's genuinely new.  The sounds are now well known.  Dave's Las Vegas vocals are now no longer something worth remarking on.  Although I hadn't listened to this in quite some time, that was my impression before, and listening to it a couple times again in advance of writing this review has convinced me that that's still true.  I maybe shouldn't speak too much until I've had a chance to do the same for Delta Machine and Spirit, but both of those gave me the same impression.  Change and innovation were tamped down considerably in order to provide the fans what Depeche Mode decided, somewhere between Exciter and Playing the Angel, that they wanted.

Now don't get me wrong.  That's not a complaint.  In fact, let me address at this point two separate, yet related and widespread fallacies.  The first is that innovation is automatically good.  It's perfectly possible to innovate in ways that are really stupid.  Maybe, for instance, one could say it was really innovative for Depeche Mode to integrate lots of polka influences in their sound.  I doubt that this would appeal to much of anyone, or make anyone happy.  One could reasonably make the case that that would be really stupid, in fact. Not because polka is stupid, but because it just has absolutely nothing in common with Depeche Mode's sound, and adding it to Depeche Mode's sound would be too far out of alignment with expectations to likely be a good idea.  (I would have used the example of gospel music here instead of polka, but... y'know.  Depeche Mode actually did that, sadly.)  So it's not a complaint that Depeche Mode recognizes what their brand has become and are wary of deviating too much from that at the risk of alienating fans and confusing everyone else.  My personal belief is that this is kind of what happened with Exciter, and DM recognized it, and made a course correction with the latest and current phase, which includes Playing the Angel and all subsequent albums so far.

The second related fallacy is that a true fan likes and appreciates everything that a band does, even if they do add polka and gospel to their slick European synthesizer new wave music.  Or, a slight variation on that, is that if the fans don't, then the fans are like Kathy Bates from Misery, trying to lock Depeche Mode up and forcing them to retread Black Celebration and Music for the Masses forever.  I would think that either of these variations on the same theme shouldn't need debunking; I'm a Depeche Mode fan, not a Depeche Mode cultist.  But sadly, it does need specific debunking, because I hear that kind of crap all the time.  The reality, of course, is that a band like Depeche Mode can produce whatever music that they want to produce, or even throw in the towel and produce nature documentaries about meerkats instead of music for all I care.  Nobody is stopping them from expressing their artistic vision however they please.  But the flipside to that is that the fans can react to this artistic vision however they please.  If I don't like everything Depeche Mode does, that doesn't make me a heretic to the Depeche Mode cult, it just makes me a normal person who has a spectrum of taste that DM (or anyone else, for that matter) may or may not hit with everything that they produce.  And if I don't like certain elements of their oeuvre as much as I do others, I mean, honestly, what normal, healthy person would expect anything other than that?

However, the juxtaposition of attempting make something that the band is pleased with and something that the fans are pleased with, as people change, grow, evolve, etc., can be a tricky balance.  At some point, every entertainer will usually find that they are locked into a rather narrower spectrum than maybe they'd like, because if they deviate too much from that, they'll lose the majority of their fans.  But this can mean that the band themselves gets tired or bored or at least unenthused about doing the same thing again and again.  And even if they don't, even the fans themselves, ironically, will start to lose that giddy enthusiasm; how many years can a fan really be excited about another DM release that'll sound pretty similar to the last several DM releases, for example?  It's a trap that I'm not sure that I see any real way out of other than to recognize it and quit while you're at the top of your game, maybe reinventing yourself with a different brand name if you want to experiment in a different kind of sound.  So all of this discussion about this (and the next two) albums needs to be filtered through that lens.  I personally am a little bit bored with the sound that Depeche Mode is doing right now, but at the same time, I'd hate for them to deviate so much from it that I couldn't even recognize what the heck they're doing anymore.  Also, I suspect that the loss of Alan Wilder as well as just the years and number of songs that they've done means that the quality will gradually go slightly downhill; the copy of a copy of a copy phenomena.

So I've decided that one needs to temper ones expectations of a band with the longevity of Depeche Mode.  The two biggest problems I have with them are 1) the sound that they're replicating as best as they can, more or less, is the Songs of Faith and Devotion (without the gospel) and Violator era, which is not my favorite era of theirs anyway, and 2) both the band and I are probably honestly a little tired of treading this same stretch of water by now, which means that there are diminishing returns for the release of new material.

All that said, this isn't meant to completely damn the album to either irrelevance or disappointment.  Sure, there aren't that many tracks that I really love from the era, but few of them are actively terrible, and there are at least two brilliant songs from this album (or its associated bonus tracks); notably Wrong and Oh Well, and Fragile Tension is also quite good.  Wrong and Oh Well are among the standout tracks crossing multiple decades, so the album wouldn't be a complete loss even if that was all that was any good on it.  Most of the rest of the tracks are serviceable, if a bit forgettable, and the Gahan songs this time around are among the most forgettable—although again, not terrible.  In Sympathy and Perfect I also think are better than average.

Jezebel is the closest thing to the terrible Martin Gore ballad, although it's both better and yet worse than most.  It doesn't sound as bad, but Jezebel and Corrupt both have lyrics and themes that are so ridiculous that they sound like parodies of Depeche Mode songs rather than actual Depeche Mode songs.  Seriously; what?!  Maybe the bonus track The Sun the Moon and the Stars is "really" the terrible Martin Gore ballad from this collection.  Spacewalk is a really strange instrumental.  I try not to bag on instrumentals too much, because they're already handicapped to some degree as it is, but this one definitely should have been a b-side, and Oh Well should have replaced it on the album; it would have greatly improved the overall album to have had Oh Well on it.

A few ancillary observations.  The band thought the cover art for Speak & Spell and even moreso Black Celebration were weird and they didn't like them; then again, this pick up sticks absurd cover somehow made the cut, and any of the weirdest covers previously are better than this one.  Also, the music videos from this era were interesting; Wrong's is actually kind of fascinating to watch in a weird way, but the Hole to Feed was bagged on—deservedly so—by pretty much everyone, as near as I can tell.  It's like a case study of what Anonymous Conservative says about r-selected versus K-selected people and their disgust factor; at best, the video is off-putting, while in reality, it's mostly just kind of an endurance challenge of weird grossness that nobody wants to see.

To be fair, that's not really an issue unless you go out of your way to watch the video, which I certainly recommend that you not do, though.  The album cover; well, you just have live with that, but even then, it could be considerably worse.

Overall, I give this album a score of four.  It's hardly one of the top tier DM albums, in general sounding kind of bland and tired, but at least giving us the brilliant Oh Well and Wrong tracks, and not actively offending us too much except by how laughably unserious Jezebel and Corrupt are.  I'm not sure that that's entirely fair; I think Wrong is better than almost anything on Songs (except maybe In Your Room) and it doesn't have Condemnation or Get Right With Me to bring it down, and yet I'm ranking it one point lower than Songs.  Is that a balanced fair assessment?  I'm not sure, except to point out that the context isn't quite the same either.  Songs is the album that followed Violator, and it was still a new direction for DM, whereas by now, Sounds is... well, it's been done already, and it's just older and more tired.  I can't remove over fifteen years of context from my evaluation of the two albums.  Other than Exciter, this is the lowest score I've given so far to a DM album.  But some album had to be here, otherwise there's no point in reviewing them if there's no criticality, and if I'm planning on ranking them, I need to put them in context with each other.  I guess I'm just suggesting that the album isn't really quite as bad as the score would seem to indicate, though.  I don't mind listening to it, although I don't get excited about doing so either; reviewing it a couple of times so I could write this wasn't unpleasant.  But overall, this album will rank as one of the more forgettable ones.