I like having physical media of stuff that I actually want to watch or listen to repeatedly. For movies, I actually use the physical media frequently; I admit that for my CD collection, I don't very much anymore. I don't even have a convenient CD player to use handy, and my car isn't equipped with one either; I used rips to mp3 on my phone almost exclusively.
I had said in my last post that I had a modest Christmas; what with my son's wedding, his honeymoon (paid for by me) and the trip out of state for the wedding, we'd expanded our budget significantly as it was. When mentioning the things I got, I don't think I mentioned the physical media movies that I got, though. I had 4-5 movies on my Amazon wishlist; some of them were actually collections, because they're just as cheap that way, and I got three of them: Napoleon Dynamite, Taken (actually the trilogy) and Back to the Future (again, actually the whole trilogy.) The Richard Lester Three and Four Musketeers collection is the only one left on my wishlist right now, actually, although I'll probably add a few more things as I think of them. We also actually watched all three of those movies (the sequels to the Taken and Back to the Future franchises were just a bonus. I got them because the trilogy was at least as cheap if not cheaper than the first movie in the series; but it's really only the first in both that I care enough to own.)
Why do I like physical media? Two reasons: 1) you never know when finding a movie is difficult or impossible online, or the internet is down, or the provider decided to cancel your "ownership" of something "in the cloud". 2) You never know when the provider is going to mess with the file that you own. Star Wars is the most egregious example of this, but frankly, a lot of Disney+ products are either on the line or get obnoxious warnings because they offend mentally unstable woke individuals. But trying to watch the original versions of Star Wars without owning the last release of the VHS tapes was impossible for many years. Even today, I have DVD's ripped from the laser discs, and that's the only version that I'll watch. Lucas' attempts to "update" the movie constantly were at best unnecessary, and at worst kind of offensive, hugely distracting, and obnoxious. I believe that he's finally given in to demand and released the original cuts somewhere at some point in the past, but I don't care to find out. I've got my own physical media, so I don't need them.
With music, it's a bit more ephemeral, but having your own copies is greatly to be preferred to streaming. I bought, years ago, the original Hollywood soundtrack to Kismet from Amazon; not on physical media, but as mp3 downloads. It has since been disappeared. I bought them, but if I hadn't saved the actual files, I'd be out of luck. The soundtrack fell out of favor with the self-appointed racism police, and now you can't get them. There's no record on Amazon anymore of me owning these, as near as I can tell, because they just want to pretend like the soundtrack never existed and they never sold it.
This isn't what I wanted to talk about today, really, if you'll forgive a lengthy set-up. I found that the best of Mesh's albums, Who Watches Over Me? is literally the only one that I can't find on Spotify or Youtube. Well; that's not entirely true. I can find bootleg playlists constructed of bootleg uploads of it on Youtube. Luckily for me, though, I have it in physical media; I bought the CD years ago, so I don't have to worry about that surprising hole in their catalog.
But that's what I really want to talk about again; the Depeche Mode soundalikes. I loved Depeche Mode as a teenager. I remember when "People Are People" was on the radio (although I was young enough not to be paying attention to who sang it) and I remember rediscovering them for real when "Strangelove" was on the radio. That's when I went into Depeche Mode bigtime; my sophomore, I think, year in high school. I listened to Music for the Masses more times in the first week that I bought it (coincidentally while reading Dracula for the first time; a star-crossed literature-music matchup if there ever was one) than I've listened to their most recent album, Memento Mori, in the almost year since I've had it. And I think Memento Mori is one of their better albums; the best since Playing the Angel (2005) which was in turn the best since Violator (1990). Depeche Mode have changed a lot over the years, but my favorite "version" of them was the mid to late 80s. In the earlier 80s, they were very much a synthpop band, but they focused as much on the pop as the synth, and though I love pop music as much as the next guy, it is kind of cheesy by definition sometimes. By the time they released their fourth album in as many years, Some Great Reward, they'd become a very dark band, full of melancholy and menace in their sound and tone, and had pioneered the use of sampling in a way that previously had only been done in a very artsy and non-commercial way. Some Great Reward and the two albums that followed it, Black Celebration and Music For the Masses changed the landscape of electronic music forever. By the time we get to Violator, Depeche Mode had found mainstream success, but were becoming less and less of an electronic band by that time too. Subsequent Depeche Mode releases have nodded at their electronic synthpop past, while also attempting to get away from it as much as they think that they can without losing their audience, which is part of the reason that Depeche Mode isn't as exciting as they used to be, and their new releases are... OK, whatever, most of the time now.
While most people will say that Depeche Mode's most influential material is their most popular and mainstream and well-known material, like Violator and maybe Songs of Faith and Devotion, I'll point out that there are dozens of Depeche Mode also-ran soundalikes, and none of them are imitating or building off of the sound of Violator; they all build off of the earlier sound of the three albums I mentioned earlier.
I remembered one of these bands and listened to a number of their songs last night. I've been listening to a lot of hard dance lately, and hard dance is easy and simple to like. A dance-floor banger mostly just has to bang, and it's satisfying. It doesn't have to do much else, or offer much, so in most cases, it doesn't. But the music that I used to listen to more was music that I held to a higher standard, and I still think that it meets that higher standard. I always come back to it no matter how much I've been into this hard dance thing for the last few years. The band in this case is Mesh.
Mesh has some stuff that sounds like it's more Pretty Hate Machine era NIN than Depeche Mode, and more recently, they've gone for a stadium electronic sound, with very lush, layered stuff. But I think their best single song is probably "Confined" from 1996's In This Place Forever, and the next two albums, The Point at Which it Falls Apart (1999) and even moreso Who Watches Over Me? (2002) are their real masterpieces. I made a brief playlist of the album closers from those three albums; "Confined", "Not Prepared" (the album version, not the club-thumper single version) and "The Trouble We're In" and holy cow was that a great little playlist. I added more to it later, of course, but those are the three best dark, brooding, menacing slow songs; probably their three best tracks.
I could also talk about similar bands Camouflage and De/Vision, but I'll save that for another post.
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