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?
Annotated, in my version, of course! I have to discuss why!
1) This is really easy. "What's Your Name?" It's terrible, it's embarrassing; even they think so. It just doesn't fit, it's too stupid.
2) I actually think Photographic, even though it's the oldest, is the one that is the most radical. The layered little melodies, all of which are catchy, but which are just part of the tapestry of the song overall, are really quite genius, and the tone, being somewhat more serious than much of the rest of the album. Of course, the entire album was radical in the sense of taking electronic music; which had otherwise been very artsy-fartsy up to this point, and making a bunch of pop songs out of it was pretty unusual (although Human League did the same thing with Dare right about the same time.
3) Clearly "Just Can't Get Enough." Not necessarily on purpose, but it's just so ubiquitous. Curiously, because for most of the time I had the American version on cassette before I had any other version, I didn't have the "normal" version of this track, though, I had what I later heard was called the Split Mix on the single.
4) That's a little bit harder of a question, but I actually think I'm going to go with the B-side Ice Machine. It's another one that doesn't feel so... Vince Clarky, I guess. A lot of people have called this an Erasure album with a different vocalist, and while that's not really fair, I can see the point. A lot of the songs sound very Vince Clarky, and wouldn't have sounded at all out of place if Andy Bell had sung them and they'd appeared on Wonderland. But sometimes, even Vince Clark doesn't sound exactly like Vince Clark; and Photograph and Ice Machine are the ones I think that qualify here.
Now, that doesn't mean that I dislike Vince Clark for picking it here; I just feel like Depeche Mode and Erasure are too divergent from each other for me to really get my mind around the fact that they were one and same back in 1980 and 81. And I didn't really hear this until I was buying up Depeche Mode's back catalog in 1988 or so, after Music For the Masses had already come out. This probably made this album stand out as very unusual in a way that I certainly wouldn't have thought if I'd been listening to Depeche Mode from the beginning (in fact, I might well have struggled with the new direction of Martin Gore and Alan Wilder's direction later in the decade, shocking though that sounds now). So Vince Clark Depeche Mode songs just sound odd and out of place to me; I kind of like listening to the songs that sound like they wouldn't be so far out of place a year or two later.
5) This is hard. It's hardly my favorite of the DM albums, and it doesn't even sound like a DM album in most cases, but because it's so different, it can't really be "ranked" with them either. I guess out of ten, I'd give it a seven.
Likely, I'll get ahead of Vaughn. He's only halfway through Some Great Reward right now, but of course, he gives you a lot more content on the topic than I do. But then again, I don't know how often I'll make an update, and as we get to the more recent albums, I'll probably just peter out, because I don't even like them very much, honestly. It's hard for me to talk about them, because I don't listen to them if I can help it most of the time.
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