Ranked

In the wake of Fletch's death, which I only heard about a week or so after it happened (it's been 2-3 weeks now) I've been revisiting my fandom of Depeche Mode. About five years ago, I'd force ranked the albums, and then I did a more detailed discussion about the albums and my opinions on them about two and a half years ago, with a few slight tweaks to the rankings. I mentioned at the time that some of the rankings were a bit fluid, and given the state of the band right now, it seems an appropriate time to revisit that, at least for a post or two.

When I did that two and a half years ago, I was still on Facebook (I haven't been since shortly after that point, however) and I was in a group that was mostly an unofficial DM fan group. They did a DM album "Survivor" exercise, where a few hundred fans would vote an album off of the island ever few days until only one was remaining. I look at this as a pretty good proxy for how the fandom generally feels about the albums. I'm somewhat gratified—not that I care that much, but still—that my own tastes seem to align pretty well with the fandom, accepting that this is a good proxy, albeit with a few notable exceptions; albums that I value more than the average fan and albums that I value less, here and there. My biggest disconnect is that I like best the Depeche Mode of the 80s, and was pretty disappointed in the DM of the 90s. (In fact, the 90s in general was a musical if not pop culture generally wasteland and anomaly that luckily we've mostly left behind.) I know that DM was at their commercial peak in the 90s, or at least the first half of the 90s, but I liked them better right before that.

Anyway, let me first give the Survivor list, worst to best, and then I'll give my new, improved, slightly tweaked personal list in annotated form. I mentioned when I did that earlier that it was a bit fluid. Sometimes inputs into my opinions sit like an ingredient in a stew. The longer it "ages" the more it comes to have a different impact, either growing or waning in its strength to impact the overall flavor. (I do love metaphors. And cooking ones are among my favorites.) Anyway, the Survivor list:

14. Spirit
13. Delta Machine
12. Sounds of the Universe
11. Exciter
10. Playing the Angel
9. Speak & Spell
8. Ultra
7. A Broken Frame
6. Construction Time Again
5. Some Great Reward
4. Songs of Faith and Devotion
3. Music For the Masses
2. Black Celebration
1. Violator

My own slightly different list. I have this in three chunks: the bottom tier, numbers 14-10, the middle tier, 9-5, and the top tier 4-1. There's a few changes in the bottom and top tier; as I said earlier, the middle tier is all very fluid, and it may look considerably shuffled from what I did before. But no album jumped tiers, for what it's worth:

Bottom Tier

14. Spirit. Falling from 13 to 14 because while musically I'm just as disappointed in it is ever, the socio-political themes of being smug, lecturing, and insulting to normal people in Britain and America has aged poorly and I'm more irritated with it than I was even when the album was new.

13. Exciter. While Exciter is no doubt "excited" to move up in the rankings, that's because Spirit has fallen, not because my appreciation for Exciter has improved. I still think it's a very poor album, and its best tracks are still not very memorable. Not even sure which ones I'd call the best tracks; I used to kinda like "Dead of Night" but it now sounds like a parody or caricature of a DM song. "Goodnight Lovers" maybe, which although it sounds nothing like what you'd expect a DM song to sound like, is probably the best on the album.

12. Delta Machine. I've often said two things: 1) sometime around or after Ultra, Dave Gahan's voice changed. Part of this was probably his brush with death by overdose and associated health problems, and some of it is also a stylistic choice to be less the slick, European electronic sound and instead a rockier, bluesier sound, which Dave (and others in the band) had become enamored with. I obviously dislike the change to the vocals, even though it's the same vocalist, and don't like the albums that come later as much as the ones that come before, although this is a more marked change in live shows than in the studio. 2) After Exciter I feel like all of the albums all had pretty much the same sound; a kind of more tired and phoned in retread of the early 90s sound, and the only question is not about the sound/style but whether or not there are enough tracks that are good enough. Playing the Angel is the best of this era, while Spirit is the worst, but Delta Machine really doesn't have anything that stands out. There's no top tier track here, like "Wrong" or "Precious", only mediocrities. The album itself starts off relatively weak, but gets slightly stronger as it goes on. It is, however, among the most forgettable of the albums. 

11. Sounds of the Universe. Of course, in this post vinyl and post cassette and even post CD age, album cover art doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to, it's worth pointing out that Sounds has literally the worst cover art of all of the DM albums. I was pretty disappointed in Sounds when it first came out, and I'll stand by that initial impression. I think it's about on par with Delta Machine except for the fact that it has a truly stand-out top tier song that would have been good on any Depeche Mode album: "Wrong" as well as two pretty good b-sides from the era, especially "Oh Well" but also "Ghost" which kind of has a "Sea of Sin" vibe to it a little bit. While the overall quality impression is relatively low, you've got to recognize the absolute brilliance of "Wrong." A few other minor notes: "Fragile Tension" is also pretty good, and the music video for "Hole to Feed" is so grotesque and off-putting that it sours the entire impression of the song and even the band itself if you've seen it and know that the band approved that travesty as a representation of the song. I know when they were a young band, they did a bunch of really bad music videos, which they hated and felt very uncomfortable and in fact exploited by—like various video directors took advantage of them to make some weird artistic expression that had nothing to do with the song—but by this point, they were a big enough band that if this thing got made, it's because the band liked it. The whole thing is a bit disappointing; I'd suggest that if you aren't a big enough DM fan to pick the whole thing up, just get the "Wrong" single, which has the "Oh Well" b-side. That's by far the best material from the entire era.

10. Songs of Faith and Devotion. I've always been very, very disappointed in this album, and I was a bit gratified that it only had a middling ranking compared to where I expected it to be in the survivor exercise mentioned above. The problems with the album are mostly 1) although it doesn't sound grungy, exactly, it did pick up a sound that was obviously influenced by the same pop culture zeitgeist, giving this a very rough, un-polished sound that has little in common with what Depeche Mode's strength had always been, 2) the experimentation with gospel on two tracks was inane; I have no idea why they thought that was a great idea. If you were going to go do something totally different and mix it in, I'd just as soon they did polka or big band. Gospel seems like the absolute poorest fit imaginable. 3) there weren't enough songs. When you take away the gospel songs, the crappy Martin Gore-sung ballad, and a few mediocre tracks, there's only a few tracks left. That said; there were still more decent songs than in later albums like Sounds or Delta Machine. But even the good ones don't really sound like what DM songs are "supposed" to sound like; "I Feel You" for instance, isn't a terrible song, but is it even an electronic synthpop song anymore with all the feedback noise and really big, hoaky steel guitars? It really was a step too far away from the style that made them famous, and this is the album where they completely lost me. Granted, they previewed this direction on Violator, but SOFAD went pretty far—too far—in a different direction, before thankfully pulling back somewhat from that on Ultra. Lots of people bemoan the lack of Alan Wilder in subsequent albums, and while I can totally get on board with that sentiment, the fact is that Alan Wilder was certainly present on this one, and his hands are all over the sound of it. Of course, I rate this album a bit lower than the fandom generally too.

Middle Tier

Before I start this tier, let me preface it with a little bit of flavor. The albums in this tier are all over the place in terms of style. It features albums like Speak & Spell where the band was—effectively—a different band altogether, with a different main song writer who subsequently left the band, and who did his work in a totally different context. It also has Playing the Angel which is part of the same grouping as most of the albums discussed previously (although its better than any of those) as well as tons of albums that were transitional between one phase and another. Because the style and context between these various albums is so disparate, it also means that most of the placements within this tier are exceptionally fluid. It's really hard to meaningfully compare Speak & Spell to Playing the Angel and rate them, when they are so incredibly different, for instance. The rankings don't mean nearly as much in this tier, consequently.

9. Playing the Angel. I earlier had this at the top of the tier (#5) and I now have it at the bottom, but again, that doesn't mean as much as you might think, since all songs in this tier are essentially in the same place anyway. Like I said, Angel fits stylistically with the post-Exciter sound, like most of the albums previously discussed, but it has way more good songs than any of them. Not only is the general, average song quality high, but it also has an absolute top-tier song that would sound great on any DM album, "Precious". It is the first to have Gahan-penned tracks, which in general aren't as good as Gore's (and he only writes the lyrics; he needs a partner to write the music) but they're not bad either. Gore said that prior to making this album, he'd been doing a fair bit of DJing, and that may contribute to the album being better than those that followed it; he was actually in a higher energy mood or something, which I think contributes to the better feel of the album.

8. Ultra. After being as disappointed as I was with Songs of Faith and Devotion as well as the attendant drama with Dave Gahan and Alan Wilder leaving the group, I honestly wasn't interested in even picking up Ultra for years. When I finally did, I found that in most respects it's better than I expected. It is a bit of a throwback in some ways; a lot of the 90s pop culture trash had been way toned down, and the mood of the album was less overtly bleak, and more a dreamy, thoughtful melancholy mood prevails here rather than the mood that Depeche Mode had carved out over several previous albums. This was maybe a good approach, given what was going on with the band. It's not a bad album, really. It isn't as big as it looks, though. Three of the tracks are little instrumental interludes, which prior albums had also included, but which had not had track separation and labels in the past. Like many of the albums in this tier, it really kind of stands alone; it's not the bluesy and rocky late phase sound, it's not the dark and bleak polished European synthpop sound of the mid to late 80s; it's kind of just its own thing in transition.

7. Speak & Spell. For a freshman effort with a completely different band line-up than it had later, this one is really hard to compare with the rest of the DM repertoire. It's too different to anything else. I moved it up compared to where I did have it, because I find that I just like listening to it a bit more, and I probably had it a little bit under-rated. It is very different, and sounds almost like young Dave Gahan singing Erasure or Yazoo songs in some was, but that makes sense, since Vince Clark is the main man for all of those groups. But it's got a ton of great tracks, and at least one of them is still played in every single live show, "Just Can't Get Enough."

6. A Broken Frame. Here, Vince Clark had left, but Alan Wilder hadn't quite started yet; Gore was still re-using some songs that he had written when it was 14-15 years old (according to an interview with Fletch, anyway) and many tracks were obviously trying to mimic the Vince Clark poppy sound. The darker or more melancholy or quirky songs don't sound like Vince Clark, but they don't (yet) sound that much like Depeche Mode of the middle to later 80s either. Many of them also have a Romantic vibe, and I don't mean that in a generic sense, but more in the sense of the Romantic movement in art, literature and music, and an exploration of those same themes. There's some really good stuff here, although it sounds "primitive" compared to what came later, in some ways, although tracks like "The Sun & the Rainfall" have still aged tremendously well, and doesn't sound dated at all. It's still a brilliant track. Others, like "Monument" or "See You" or "The Meaning of Love" on the other hand, are charming in a dated kind of way, but sound kitschy and old-fashioned.

5. Construction Time Again. I didn't necessarily mean for the first three albums to be ranked chronologically like that, but given that all three are transition albums, on the way to becoming something else, maybe it makes sense. I'm not actually sure that there is a ranking that isn't artificial between them; I'd probably say that all three are comparable and that I could shuffle any of these three in any way whatsoever and not feel like it was unfair. Construction was the first of the Gareth Jones trilogy too, where famous hired gun producer Jones was brought in to work with the band in the studio. Along with Daniel Miller, the label boss and sometime producer himself, an awful lot of the credit for the sound of the band as they evolved into being the recognizable DM (in the next album after this) should go to these non-band members. Jones obviously had less skin in the game for the band itself than Miller as label boss, who in turn had less skin in the game than the band members, but they also had more experience and brought new techniques. The band themselves started picking up on many of these, particularly Alan Wilder, who was now a full-fledged member of the band by the recording of this album, and they did get to the point where they didn't need as much "shepherding" and they had an established tone, mood and sound after a while that wasn't still forming. A few of the tracks on this album could have made the jump up into the next one, and sounded like fully fledged mature DM sounding tracks, but mostly they weren't quite there yet. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, though—"Everything Counts" is one of their most iconic tracks, and they finish pretty much every show with it even now. But many of the tracks still sound kind of hoaky, and Gore's "political consciousness" which is a polite way of saying "Marxist bullshit" are all over this album. Luckily, that was mostly left behind, although a few traces of it remained in the next album. And the art direction deliberately used some Nazi and Soviet like iconography, but I'm pretty sure that was just in an attempt to be edgy. Coupled with the dark sound and much more personal nature of the tracks in the upcoming couple of albums, I'm quite sure of it; I can't imagine that even with the socio-political evil evident in Spirit that anyone in the band would have legitimately admired the Soviet Union in 1983.

Top Tier

We're finally to the top tier, and these are four consecutive albums released in the mid-80s to early 90s; specifically 1984-1990, although not in that order exactly. To me, this is when Depeche Mode really established a sound, tone and mood that was mature and well-formed. When they veered away from it in the 90s, both because they were themselves getting tired of it and getting attracted by various other things that were completely outside of the interests of their fanbase, as well as the general crappy zeitgeist of the 90s overall (can I blame Bush and especially Clinton for that? It seems fair.) they went in directions that made them less like Depeche Mode, because by that point, Depeche Mode had established themselves as a certain kind of band. It took a few albums to get there, and they ran with it for a few more albums, but by the time they had produced 7 albums, while at their commercial peak, they were clearly starting a downhill run into some other place.

4. Violator. Most fans, as noted above, put this at number 1, but I was always disappointed in it. Not only did it indicate the beginning of the change in sound, with its big, broad hoaky steel guitars and kind of grungy "fuzzed up" sounds, but it also didn't have a lot of tracks, honestly, and many of them weren't even all that well produced. Even truly great songs from the era, like "Enjoy the Silence" (which even I have to admit that if I could only pick one DM song to listen to ever again, it would probably be this one) didn't have great album mixes; some of the other versions of it that came out were better than the album mix. Maybe that's not entirely fair. "Pleasure, Little Treasure", a b-side from the Music For the Masses era a few years earlier was the true beginning of that change in sound, and Masses uses a lot more guitar than I at first really noticed. But it never overpowers the sound (except in "Pleasure") or changes the mood of it. That said, it's still a solid album, and if I was disappointed in it relative to Masses that's partly because Masses is probably my favorite album of all time from any band period. Maybe. (Duran Duran's Rio and Def Leppard's Hysteria deserve a shout out as contenders too.) And, the problems that Violator had really metastasized in the next album instead of this one, when Depeche Mode seem to have collectively decided that they didn't want to be Depeche Mode anymore at all, and were interested in being some other band entirely.

3. Some Great Reward. The second of the Gareth Jones trilogy, and the first album (of three) where Depeche Mode really finally realized their mature, fully developed, iconic sound, that is still often and deliberately imitated by dozens of electronic synthpop bands today. Fully mature, in this case, is probably a tad over-selling it; there are a few of the weird socio-political vibes and occasional hoaky sounds of Construction Time lingering here and there, and I think the band itself looks back at some of this material and thinks that it's "too poppy" and not serious enough for them to be very pleased with anymore. They hadn't played "People Are People" in a live show in years; not since sometime in the 90s, which is kind of odd considering that it was a big, genuine hit and fan favorite for exactly this reason. On the other hand, "Blasphemous Rumours" is probably the most iconic Depeche Mode song. Not iconic in the sense that it's the first song anyone thinks of when they hear the band's name, but iconic in the sense that it encapsulates everything about the mood, the tone and the feel of the band in one package better than any other track does. 

2. Black Celebration. For a long time this and Masses went back and forth for the top slot; it is hard to pick between them. I think Masses is more accessible, while Celebration is perhaps a bit more artistic. Two things probably permanently set the order netween them, though. 1) Finding out that "But Not Tonight" being the album ender was not the band's wishes, and not the way the album was released outside of America. To me, it somehow fits remarkably well in adding a "mood coda" if you will to the album, and it's hard to imagine the album without it. It feels incomplete and lacking a punchline somehow, and yet that's exactly how the band intended it to be. 2) This was the third and final of the Gareth Jones trilogy. After this album, everyone decided that the band needed some new jokes (not to cast any shade on Jones' work with them, which really turned them in to what they became) and the recording process for Celebration had been difficult and tense. Jones bowed out and Daniel Miller stepped back too. Who also, it might be pointed out, had more and more demands on his time anyway as his label was growing and doing gangbusters business. He no longer had the time to spare months in the studio with his band helping them develop the sound of their album. Alan Wilder had spent so much time with Miller and Jones that he had turned into a competent and probably, in fact, brilliant producer himself by this point. For Masses, they got David Bascombe, who'd made a name for himself producing Tears for Fears, including the song "Shout" which many have compared to Depeche Mode's sound. Although everyone, Bascombe included, have said that his role was a little more back-seaty; almost more of an engineer than a traditional producer, while the band itself, especially Alan Wilder, took the lead in charting the sound of the album. Masses, therefore, becomes the album that's the most Depeche Modey, if that makes any sense, made while at the peak of their sound, which they developed under the guidance of Jones and Miller, but the one where they were the most themselves without anyone else's influence. I kind of like that. And that talks more about the next album than this one, but it also explains why I think it deserves the top spot and why Celebration has probably permanently been moved down to #2 after waffling between the two of them for years.

1. Music For the Masses. And here we are. The magnum opus of the best period of Depeche Mode's development. The most Depeche Modey of Depeche Mode's albums, and in many ways the one that's the most imitated. Although who can say; I think it's fair to say that Masses was a pretty obvious development from where Celebration had been, and other than the willingness to add more guitars to the sound, although still keeping them subtle at this stage, was a step who's significance wouldn't be recognized for quite some time. It's also worth pointing out that Masses is the first time I really became aware of Depeche Mode and paid a lot of attention to them (I do remember when "People Are People" was a radio hit and I loved it at the time, but somehow I didn't even figure out who sang it until later). They say first love is best love sometimes, and that may have been true for Depeche Mode; I heard Masses first, and therefore its my favorite. It think other than that, my own taste and personality had been developing to the point where Depeche Mode at that time was just the perfect fit for me, and I got into it pretty hard. And that's still where I am, in most respects. I don't want to say that my musical tastes haven't had any development since I was 15-16, because obviously that's not true, but they were set solidly enough that they didn't have massive upheaval, only added layers to my taste. Depeche Mode's tone, mood, attitude, and everything else was the perfect fit for me then, and that era of Depeche Mode's fully developed sound, which lasted for several albums without a major shift in direction, is still a pretty darned good fit for me now. And as Depeche Mode have abandoned that style of music and gone in different directions, I think I (and I honestly believe the majority of the fanbase) is still standing over in the general area of where Depeche Mode was in the late 80s or maybe early 90s, and saying, basically, "hey, we're still over here. You overshot the venue and are in the wrong place." 

Not that they should be locked in a studio and forced to churn out more of the exact same. To be honest, that isn't a good strategy either, because the excitement for a new release that sounds pretty much same as the last several releases starts to wane after a time. Look at bands that have remained too static and done the same thing album after album after album. So, there's not a good answer for it. Maybe it just is what is is, and I should enjoy the albums from their heyday and not complain about the subsequent albums that aren't from their heyday and aren't really for me in the same sense that they used to be.