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 lot of fans don't like Ultra. It's also hard to separate Ultra from the drama the band experienced during this era. Alan Wilder quit. Dave Gahan was clinically dead for two minutes after overdosing (he had also been hospitalized earlier for ODing, and for a suicide attempt.) There was no tour. In particular, Alan Wilder's leaving is seen as a black mark on the album... many fans say that his influence was sorely missed on this album, which is usually seen as fairly low in fan acclaim relative especially to the run of albums that came before it, but even the run of albums that came after it (well, relatively speaking. Exciter is usually considered even worse by almost everyone.)
Given that I didn't really love Violator and said that Songs of Faith and Devotion was the album that made me know that my break-up with Depeche Mode was coming, you'd think that I'd really hate Ultra. I didn't buy it for years. I didn't even listen to it all the way through for years (for some reason, I had a cassette single of Barrel of a Gun for years, though. I don't even know why I would have bought a cassette single that late. (Maybe because I still didn't have a CD player in my car, and because it was cheap, and it was a good way to sample the output at very little cost to myself? I honestly don't even know at this point.)
However, you'd be wrong to think that. I actually don't think Ultra is all that bad. Oh, sure—I don't think it's great. But it's not terrible. By this time, I'd come to grips with the fact that Depeche Mode wasn't the band that I used to love anymore, and they were doing something different. But ironically, in at least some ways, Ultra got back to its roots. It was more of an electronic band output again. The grunge phase in pop culture was waning, if not terminally so during 1996 and early 1997 when Ultra was recorded, so that influence was mostly gone. The should have been untried experiments with gospel and blues were muted if not gone entirely. Ultra actually, even without Alan Wilder, sounded more like Depeche Mode, in many respects. Although Wilder was gone, he'd already shown everyone his production genius, and it was possible to imitate it to some degree by then, and Tim Simenon was already a highly regarded and very competent producer who was certainly able to imitate the influence of Wilder at least enough to make his loss... well, it wasn't completely devastating to their sound. There were a few "conventional" things that were done, like bringing in an orchestra for Home, but then again, they'd already experimented with guest non-electronic musicians like the gospel choirs on Songs even with Wilder.
Where Ultra deviates from its predecessors is actually in tone and theme, and I don't know how much (if any) influence Wilder had on that versus Gore's songs that he brought to the table that time around. True, only Construction Time Again had the experiment in depersonalized "socially conscious" themes (granted, a few lingering echoes of this persisted into Some Great Reward), but the personal introspective themes on this album were different than the bleak—even dramatically and violently so, in many respects—approach of the past; a bit quieter and maybe rather than bleak, the less dramatic and significantly toned down adjective of melancholy is the strongest that can be applied to them. And maybe after the drama that surrounded the Devotional Tour and the Songs album generally, a more understated, quieter, thoughtful album was what was needed. Even the band's appearance reflects this; Martin Gore doesn't look like "a nightmare of knees, nipples and nonsense" this time around, and Dave Gahan gave up his skinny British Jesus look. I actually find that while sure, I don't love Ultra, I actually kinda like it more than I thought I would when I resisted (or more fairly, simply couldn't be bothered) to pick it up for years.
I'll also point out that early in Depeche Mode's career, non-album singles were more common; Get the Balance Right, Shake the Disease, It's Called a Heart, etc. Although associated with the slightly later The Singles 86>98 release, Only When I Lose Myself is also from this same general time period, and should probably be loosely associated with Ultra as well. The Remastered re-release of Ultra does so, and includes it plus it's b-sides as bonus tracks.
Anyway, before I start talking about the five questions, let me also point out just a few other minor things about this album. While Music for the Masses and Violator in particular had instrumental bridge tracks, like the three interludes, they were "hidden tracks" that were just extensions or codas of other songs. In Ultra, they were called out specifically as additional tracks. This makes the five questions a bit unfair; I don't consider Mission Impossible (Interlude) at the end of Music For the Masses to be a track that was eligible for being cut, because it's just a weird little coda at the end of Pimpf. On the other hand, Junior Painkiller and the other interludes on Ultra are separate tracks and are called out and labeled. In the interest of a fair comparison, I've decided that Uselink, Jazz Thieves and Junior Painkiller don't count, because they're too obvious, and their truest correspondences from earlier albums weren't really in a position to be considered either. It's also worth pointing out that because these interlude tracks were called out as separate tracks, it gives the album a slightly inflated appearance. If they had been folded into the tracks that they followed, as was done on on previous albums, this would be yet another slim 9-track album There's simply not as much material here as there was on most albums of the past.
Anyway, on to the questions!
1) I would cut The Bottom Line. It's one of two Gore ballads, and yes, it is almost always one of the Gore ballads that gets the ax if up to me. I don't love Home either, but it's better than The Bottom Line. And to be fair, I don't hate The Bottom Line and think it's absurd, like I do some of the Gore ballads *ahem* Damaged People, I Want You Now, but it's the weakest non-instrumental bridge track on the album, certainly.
2) Plenty of tracks sound like they're trying to recapture past glories, or echo past successes; with greater and lesser fidelity depending, and I like plenty of those tracks (Barrel of a Gun, Useless, It's No Good, etc. but I actually think one of the most radical track, at least for Depeche Mode, is Insight. It really explores a different tone than any other track to date that they've done, I think.
3) Barrel of a Gun, although only because I had that cassette single mentioned above.
4) It's No Good. This is perhaps an obvious and easy, safe choice, but it's the one that sounds the most like the Depeche Mode everyone loves, so it's... well, yeah. It is easy to pick it.
5) Six out of ten. I like it better than Songs of Faith and Devotion, in part because of it's greater fidelity to what I believe the Depeche Mode brand was always supposed to be, but I certainly don't love it or think that it lives up to the reputation of the older, greater work.
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