Depeche Mode Survivor

I'm woefully out of date and haven't made a significant update on my Depeche Mode album reviews in a long time.  That's OK, because nobody is listening to them anyway, and I'm only doing it for my own amusement and because I love the sound of my own voice too much.  But I made reference in those reviews to a Depeche Mode Survivor series of polls going on on the Vaughn George facebook group, associated with his own Vaughn George album reviews.  The format was like Survivor; you started with the full list of albums and then voted your least favorite off the island, at which point you did the same thing again a few days later, but one album shorter.  This led to a situation in which an approximation of the most to least popular albums, among a population of at least 200 voters (all DM fans) emerged, and it had a few surprises.  I'll eventually continue my album review podcasts, but in the meantime, here's the list, in order, least to most favorite.

14. Spirit
13. Delta Machine
12. Sounds of the Universe
11. Exciter
10. Playing the Angel
09. Speak & Spell
08. Ultra
07. A Broken Frame
06. Construction Time Again
05. Some Great Reward
04. Songs of Faith and Devotion
03. Music For the Masses
02. Black Celebration
01. Violator

I'm surprised (although delighted) to see that Songs of Faith and Devotion didn't rank higher than it did.  I've never really thought that one was all that great, and I was sad to learn that fans approved of the massive change in that album as much as they did—although confused, as they haven't much liked the output that followed in the wake of that change.  If SOFAD is so good, how come you hate the subsequent albums that sound so much like it?  I also thought that Playing the Angel was more popular than it was, but I guess maybe that was mostly just me after all.  Granted, it's a post SOFAD album, and it sounds like it, but it also has a much better ratio of good to mediocre songs compared to most of the others in its category, as well as having Precious, which is absolutely a top tier song.  This makes Playing the Angel jump up out of the first chunk, even though by regular, objective, measurable features.  It "belongs" with the post-SOFAD group, but by quality, it belongs with the next group instead.

My own list, which I probably shouldn't spoil, but I'll go ahead and do it anyway, goes something a bit more like this, and I've divided the list into three chunks:

CHUNK #1: Bottom tier, bluesy, rocky, "modern" Depeche Mode

14. Exciter
13. Spirit
12. Delta Machine
11. Sounds of the Universe
10. Songs of Faith and Devotion

I don't like most of these as much because I don't like the direction the band went in, and on top of that, I don't think that their songs were as good as they had been in prior albums.

CHUNK #2: Middle tier, albums that all sound very different from each other, and to be fair, could all be shuffled around without much impact.  They don't really compare well to each other because they are all so different from each other, so the order is just based on how much I like to listen to them at the point in time that I'm making this list.

9. Speak & Spell
8. Ultra
7. A Broken Frame
6. Construction Time Again
5. Playing the Angel

Speak & Spell is so different it's effectively a different band, even though it has the same name and a few of the same people, A Broken Frame and Construction Time Again are both transitional albums that don't really sound very much like any other album in the oeuvre.  Ultra is kinda like that too; a bit of a throwback after SOFAD, but which doesn't sound like SOFAD, and Playing the Angel is a post-SOFAD album that just is way better than any other post-SOFAD album.

CHUNK #3: "Golden Age" Depeche Mode from their best and most productive period, when they perfected their sound and were at their peak.  My order is a bit different than the normal one; I actually think Violator is the least of this period rather than the best.

4. Violator
3. Some Great Reward
2. Black Celebration
1. Music For the Masses

I admit that I sometimes am on the fence about whether or not I think Black Celebration or Music For the Masses is really my favorite of the two, but I usually give the nod to the latter for two completely subjective reasons: 1) it's the one that I first discovered, after hearing radio play of Strangelove, and sometimes first love is best love, and 2) it's the one after Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones took a step back.  While I've got to give them a ton of credit for helping create the Depeche Mode sound, and MFtM does have a producer credit, Alan Wilder has said that Bascombe really played a role more like an engineer than a producer, and so Masses is really the album that is the "purest" Depeche Mode; their own work, without influence from others.  Granted, I didn't even actually know that until fairly recently, but I do also think that it's a really cool thing.  That said, it's probably mental justification for my emotional resonance a bit more with that album than Black Celebration, when I otherwise might want to justify BC as a slightly more artistic album.