I've talked a bit over the last few months of my gathering of all of my Depeche Mode music into folders; first, the actual CDs (albums) themselves, and then rounding them up with the b-sides and other bonus tracks, and considering that my own version of a "deluxe" album, and then reviewing it as such.
Another band I like, which is similar in most respects to Depeche Mode is De/Vision, and I've done a similar thing for them. However, I've magnified the scope even more by including the remixes and alternate versions that I have of them. Granted, I probably couldn't do this with Depeche Mode, because of the sheer number of alternate versions and remixes that I have, many of them unofficial bootlegs that I've collected here and there over the years, but while the scope is pretty massive for De/Vision, and still a pretty monumental task, it's smaller than it would have been for Depeche Mode.
I don't pretend to have literally every version of every track that they've ever released, of course. For one thing, De/Vision have really embraced the business model of patronage, limited editions, and collectible releases, so it's not really feasible to get everything that they've ever released anyway, but I do have most of it. I tallied 358 tracks collected into a variety of folders starting from their very earliest release Boy on the Street in 1992 (I don't have any copies of their self-released cassette from the late 80s) through to their 2018 Citybeats album.
There are actually a handful of alternate versions of some songs that I know that I have somewhere kicking around that I didn't even bother looking for, actually—an alternate version of "Aimee" remixed by Intuition, and all of the "Turn Me On" remixes except for the Rename one, are tracks that I have somewhere but didn't go dig through my CD-R archives to see where I left them. There may well be a few more that I'm not even remembering too. Sure, I could probably find them without too much trouble, but I also remember not caring one way or another about those, so certainly I don't care too much about the ones that I don't even have.
I also took the alternate versions from Zehn and Remixed and filed them with the original album as "bonus tracks" and don't consider Zehn or Remixed to be their own albums in their own right. And I did something similar with the various Popgefahr remixed albums, save that I didn't duplicate any of the tracks that appeared on both the German and the US releases. And I did find a handful of bootleg or other remixes of a few songs and included them. Some of them were, I believe, done for Popgefahr but not chosen by the band, but later given away by the remixers.
Although I did thrift out some of the tracks I don't like by not including them, I do know for sure that there are several tracks on Remixed and the Popgefahr remixes that I don't like too, but I did not thrift them out yet, mostly because I don't remember very well what the ones I don't like are like.
Anyway, I'm going to go through a project where I go through these albums, sorta like what I'm doing with Depeche Mode, except not quite as formalized. I can already tell you more or less what I'm going to think; the early stuff isn't generally as good, although some of the really classic tracks like "Your Hands on My Skin" or "Try to Forget" come from this era. Fairyland? is the first album that I'd really consider overall high quality and interesting to listen to instead of being a mediocre synthpop album with a handful of good tracks. Monosex, which follows it, is probably the very best one. After that, there's a bit of a dearth of great albums, even though the song production has improved, the songs themselves largely have not. Most of these albums have at least a few really good tracks on them, with the possible exception of Subkutan, but overall, they're not wonderful, and there's a lot of mediocre tracks too. Noob is the first really good album after Monosex, with a more than 50% great tracks ratio, and Popgefahr follows it, which is the other contender for their best album ever. The Popgefahr remix albums were also a very interesting experiment (they released no fewer than five different remix albums, and although a handful of remixes are repeated here and there, in general, there are loads of alternate versions of all of the tracks on Popgefahr.) Some of these alternate versions are phenomenally good, but many of them are not.
After Popgefahr, a number of additional albums came out that in general rate just below Noob, I think. They have plenty of good tracks, and a number of mediocre ones.
Relative to Depeche Mode, I'd say De/Vision have less of a quality arc; that is, their quality is more consistent, especially after they got through their early days and picked up some experience. That said, they aren't as good as Depeche Mode. They maybe have as many really good tracks, but that's only because they've released so many more tracks to choose from. Depeche Mode, on the other hand, went through a phase, peak Depeche Mode, where almost everything they released was great with only a few exceptional wrongly considered tracks and then after their "crash" came back as a mediocre post-electronic band who only occasionally dazzle us with their brilliant potential. De/Vision aren't, I presume, just quite as brilliant, but their work ethic and sheer number of releases means that they've risen to a pretty high status in my esteem, and they have a lot of tracks that I really quite like.
Anyway, I'll get to this project a little bit later, but since I've now completely and thoroughly organized all of my De/Vision music, it's actually something that I can do now, and will within the next few weeks.
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