Depeche Mode Five Questions: Spirit

I'll do a belated Friday Art Attack on Monday, I think (my schedule looks hopefully light, but today's has not been.)  But first, let me get a bit closer to my wrap-up review of Depeche Mode and their career.  I'm also reading the book Stripped by Jonathan Miller.  It was published a while ago, so it came out about in time to coincide with the release of Exciter nearly twenty years ago now, and obviously there's more to say about them in the years since, but it also gives some behind the scenes information that as far as I know can't be had anywhere else.  Between reading Stripped and watching the documentaries that came out with the deluxe edition remastered re-releases, that's probably the best way to get the "Depeche Mode story", as much as can be gotten without actually sitting down with the band members yourself, getting them drunk, and getting them to talk about the good old days.  Going through this process has had me fine-tuning the scores and rankings just a bit as I've done this; I've found that some albums that I'd kinda slagged off as uninteresting were perhaps a tad unappreciated, and at least once or twice I had the opposite reaction too.

Now that I'm reviewing and rating the last album by the band, I'll be ready go post the finalized rankings soon, as well as give a bigger, broader, retrospective.  I'm actually thinking about recording rather than writing this, though—probably with my voice recorder app on my phone, and then loading it up to YouTube or something and talking about DM there.  That will be a lengthy (because I missed my calling in life; I should have been a lecturing professor.  Plus, I love the sound of my own voice) summary, and I rather like the idea of rambling about it in vocal form rather than typing.  It'll be different, but what can I say?  I've had a lot of podcasts and youtube casts on Depeche Mode going on in the background these last few weeks; in fact, it's specifically a review series by Vaughn George on his channel that got me started on this as well.

I said earlier at one point that one of the things Depeche Mode was like to me personally could be encapsulated by the metaphor of some old girlfriend that you had and you were crazy in love with, but whom you grew apart from, eventually having to break up, and because of nostalgia or whatever, you still occasionally check in on Facebook or whatever to see what she's up to only to be amazed at how different you've become in the years since.  Of course, the reality is that those differences were likely always there, and you just didn't see them because you focused on the things that you did have in common when you were living high and loving life with each other.

Depeche Mode is very different from my ideal in a number of key elements: 1) they're often very insulting to my identity, contemptuous of religion and Christianity, and resentful of some supposed "oppression" that they've suffered at their hands comes through between the lines.  It sounds like, after reading Stripped as far as I have, that a big part of this was Martin Gore being a hopeless and hapless beta all his life, who had a ball-buster girlfriend early on in high school and the first couple of years of his career.  Once he left her and ran off with some skanky German girl, he did a complete about face, declared himself an atheist, cross-dressing, and dressing like he was in the S&M scene (although whether he really truly was in that scene or not is, I suppose, not really confirmed.)  For whatever reason, this hasn't bothered me too much in the past, both because the band themselves hinted at a somewhat allegorical use of the sex and religion metaphors in their music, and I was only too eager to accept that apologia. But that's the definition of passive-aggressive, isn't it?  They insult you and then when you call them out, pretend like that's not really what they meant, and you're misinterpreting them, and somehow they're the victim after all.  I think this is probably hard-coded with Gore's personality, at least.  Maybe some of the others too, but who really knows, because Gore does almost all of the song-writing.  Gahan's foray into the task hasn't given us nearly as much to work with, plus it's less personally revealing in most respects. 2) I don't like Depeche Mode because I cultishly follow them personally; I'm a huge fan of electronic music and a bit of pessimistic, sarcastic personality who naturally gravitated to the darker and more bleak and melancholy, and at exactly the right time for me to get into music, Depeche Mode was carving out their own niche that was perfectly suited to me.  They've, however, moved in different directions with both their sound and even some of their themes over the years.  This has had me feeling a bit left behind, and I've turned to other types of music, or looked at the better Depeche Mode imitators over the years.  As an aside, none of them are as good as Depeche Mode during their peak, but some—De/Vision, Camouflage, Red Flag, and Mesh in particular—are still very credible, and certainly they're putting out stuff that I like better than what DM themselves are doing lately.  The worst part of this is the addition of all kinds of new elements that take them away from their slick, dark, European electronic pop music roots; lots of really noisy rock, gospel, jazz or whatever influences dilute what Depeche Mode so unique and amazing in the first place.  3) Depeche Mode feels tired and old lately.  When they veer too far from their sound, their fans lose interest.  But when they stay too close to it, they seem to get tired and bored themselves, I suspect.  Certainly that's the sound, I think.

In that light, Spirit is very much a part of the four album trajectory that started after Exciter; Playing the Angel was a deliberate "back to roots" sounding album, but they've gotten more tired and filler-sounding every album since then.  Most of what I said for Sounds of the Universe or Delta Machine applies to Spirit as well; there's no moments of stand-out brilliance, such as Wrong or Oh Well.

A lot of people have talked about liking Cover Me, but I think it's tired sounding myself and doesn't do much for me.  It's not bad, but if that's the stand-out track, that's not saying much.  So Much Love is the one that tries to be accessible in a more traditional way, as do the first two tracks, Going Backwards and Where's the Revolution.  Eternal is the obligatory terrible Martin Gore ballad that nobody ever likes, but which he keeps doing.  And for an unusual reason, he did another one and ended the album with it on Fail.

So, it's about the same level as Delta Machine, really.  If I didn't speak English and it were just about the music, I'd probably rank it just a tad higher; maybe about the same level as Sounds of the Universe (although noting that lacking anything as good as Wrong would put it behind it still.)  In fact, I initially had done so, because I had listened to it in the background without really paying attention to the songs that closely, and certainly not to the lyrics.  However, of course, I do speak English.  This is the album where Depeche Mode tried to apply the "get woke go broke" mantra and stepped up their low grade passive-aggressive attacks on Western civilization in favor of hitting you over the head with it.  Appalled that the people of the Anglosphere would actually attempt, even as weakly and half-heartedly as they did, to assert their self-interest in their own countries by voting for Brexit and electing Trump, the themes in the songs are about as subtle as they were in The Last Jedi and just as welcome.  This was a step too far, and I am genuinely kinda pissed off about it.  Shut up, Martin.  Nobody cares what you think about politics.  All of you entertainment types are too stupid and uneducated about anything substantial to be able to say anything about social or political topics without sounding like morons, as well as being too psychologically, emotionally and mentally broken to have any reason to think that any serious person should listen to you anyway.  Seriously; knock it off.  Your job is the entertainer.  You're the court jester.  The musician.  Nobody wants to have their entertainment turn into a smug, holier-than-thou lecture about lunatic left-wing politics by people who are too lacking in self-awareness to realize their own projection and emotional and mental crippling flaws anyway—which I'll point out that by watching the documentaries and reading the Stripped book are now kinda public knowledge after all (not to spoil anything.)

In any case, this get woke go broke attitude drops Spirit below Delta Machine in my estimation; it's the second worst DM album, with only Exciter standing behind it.  I just got it recently; after the last two albums before this had disappointed me I wasn't in a big hurry to rush out and get more of the same, and the Where's the Revolution track on youtube didn't exactly thrill me either or cause me to reevaluate that approach.  So I've heard it the very least of all of the Depeche Mode albums so far.  As more time goes by, will I like it better and get over the stupid political posturing and virtue-signaling, or will more time only cause that to piss me off even more to the point where I like this album the least?  I suspect the latter, but we'll see.

As noted; the best songs are probably... I dunno.  Going Backwards, if you can ignore the words, and Cover Me is OK.  I'm not sure if Fail or Eternal is worse, but they're both terrible.  Three out of ten.