But Not Tonight

Going over some of my tracks; remixes and cover versions, in particular. For whatever reason, I think I may have had more cover versions of "But Not Tonight" than any other Depeche Mode track. I certainly had at least twice as many as I do for "Never Let Me Down Again" even though the later is one of DM's signature tracks. For "Enjoy the Silence" I actually have relatively few cover versions, but tons of remixes, many of them bootleg remixes.  I'm not quite sure what to make of that, or if that's not really enough data that I should try to make anything of it. But I'll take a stab at it anyway, because nothing has ever stopped me from venturing my opinion on things, even if I also freely admit that it's a just so story. I think "But Not Tonight" is actually one of DM's best tracks, and I think it's actually one of their most popular tracks, and one that people really like in spite of the fact that the band itself doesn't seem to.

The band kind of dumped on Sire Records, the American partner of Mute, who released "But Not Tonight" as a single because they got it on the soundtrack of a "dodgy" movie (which, admittedly, seems to have been somewhat of a flop) and the failure of the single was part of what convinced DM to write off the possibility of major success in America. At least for a year or so; when they did the Masses Tour they realized somehow that they were actually huge, especially after the risky Rose Bowl show was a gigantic smash.

But they also didn't like that "But Not Tonight" was released, and they've rarely played it. Alan famously wrote it off, saying that they spent nine days remixing "Stripped" and whipped off "But Not Tonight" in just a couple of hours or something. So what? How much time you spend working on a song isn't necessarily indicative of how good it is. Now, granted, "Stripped" is also a great song, and one of DM's most iconic too. But if DM had actually embraced "But Not Tonight" it could be too. It's clearly well-loved. It's clearly frequently covered. I do see, however, fewer bootleg mixes of it, for whatever reason, but not none. (Dominatrix and Kaiser, for example, both pop up. But they've remixed almost everything DM.)

As an aside, although I don't think this song was the first place I encountered the word "debauchery", of course, it's certainly the song that made it a word that I was very familiar with. I love to use the word debauchery and debauch, all thanks to you, "But Not Tonight!"

Of the cover versions, many are more or less similar to the original, except with a stronger Scandinavian accent, or something like that. I think the best ones are Æon Rings, which is a little different, but still excellent, and I also like Fotonovela and Jimmy Somerville's versions for being significantly different. Scott Weiland, late lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots did an absolutely killer version; very delicate and fragile. Really highlights the lyrics and their theme. A version by New Life Generation is probably the best of the "faithful" covers, by which I mean that it changes very little, but just enough to be at least as interesting as a good remix. 

Depeche Mode... over

I don't mean that the band is over. what's left of them may churn out another album or two still. They're getting pretty old, but they're not dead, and who knows if they still feel the need to produce more songs, tour again, and grab more of what they can with their grabbing hands. They might well. I suspect that I'm done seeing them live, however. I really wish I'd seen them on the Masses Tour or even the Violator tour, but I didn't. I saw the Playing the Angel tour and the most recent Memento Mori tour. They were noticeably lower energy in the almost twenty years between those two tours, and their back catalog is getting more full of stuff that I have less interest in. 

I put all of their albums, and by albums I mean my "deluxe album" selections which includes b-sides and non-album singles from the same era (like "Shake the Disease" or "Martyr", etc.) and played their entire catalog, minus remixes, back to back to back. It took me the better part of two or three weeks to get through it all during my commutes back and forth to work, but to be fair, I was kind of sick last week and worked from home most of the week too. Still, it was a pretty big undertaking in terms of just listening to music. I committed to playing hundreds of tracks before I would make any changes in my play queue. I finished it late Saturday night, and was able to listen to something else, finally, on the way to church on Sunday. One of the things that I anticipated, of course, is that Depeche Mode "peaked" in 1987 with Music for the Masses, so I knew that the quality of the listen-through would be front-loaded. But I wanted to see what I thought of some of the later material after not really listening to it very recently or very much, and I did always think that their most recent album, Memento Mori was their best one since Playing the Angel at least, if not even further back.

I was a little surprised to find that I've concluded that I'm kind of over Depeche Mode. Maybe I finally grew up. Maybe I've just changed too much and they haven't, or that they've changed in ways that I can't follow. The older stuff I still enjoyed, but I wasn't as excited to go through all of those tracks as I expected to be. I feel like I'd rarely ever feel like listening to a whole album all the way through anymore; I'm at the point where I'm OK just cherry-picking tracks that I want to hear, and that's that. I certainly won't want to do their entire catalog like that, even if I do pick up an album or two here and there. The later albums weren't as bad as my memory made me fear them to be, but they were pretty forgettable, with the exception of a few stand-out tracks. Even Exciter wasn't that bad, and overall I mostly enjoyed it, but not enough that I'd be excited to do it again. No pun intended.

Spirit, which was already the worst, was even worse. It didn't sound terrible, but Martin Gore writing about political themes in 2017, where he's trying to chastise people for voting for Brexit and Donald Trump, was bad when it was released, and sounds absolutely cringy, out of touch and embarrassing today. At least in 2017, he was echoing a strong Establishment narrative about reality; today, that narrative has collapsed completely, and Martin Gore's political sensibilities sound like those of an arrogant, entitled thirteen year old. (Of course, as part of the resistance, such as it was, to that Establishment, I found that Martin Gore's anthems of Establishment narrative, ironically pretending like he was part of the resistance, was cringy, off-putting and made me angry right away. But now, it's to laugh at rather than be angry at. But it still doesn't make anything on that album sound any better; if anything, it sounds stupid beyond all reason after even just a few weeks of Trump in office, and similar movements all over the countries of Western civilization.)

Mostly what I discovered is that I'm kinda over Depeche Mode. I still like them. I still like a lot of their classic era tracks, from the middle to late 80s and even the early 90s. I even still like some of their stuff since then, although not as much. But to some degree, I identified as a Depeche Mode fan in terms of my musical taste, and well... I guess I no longer do, and this exercise made that clear. Depeche Mode are a couple of cranky old farts who never really grew up, and that's increasingly clear. I identified with them as a teenager, because they were geared towards speaking to issues that a teenager faces. It was the ultimate somewhat alienated teen anthem to listen to Depeche Mode for Gen-Xers. Even when it no longer applied to me because I wasn't an alienated teenager anymore, I could at least still empathize and understand that perspective. Now, however, it's starting to feel cringy and "stuck" in a paradigm and perspective that simply isn't appropriate for someone my age, much less someone their age; they're a good ten years older than me. 

I'm not sure if I feel sad to feel "over" Depeche Mode, or if it's just the acceptance of something that clearly already happened, and it just feels natural. What do I listen to instead?

Well, first off, I'm finding that I identify less with my taste in music than I did when I was younger. I still like music, and I still identify more generally with the 80s, as a consummate Gen-Xer. But I listen to music not to express my identity as much, but just to have something cool going on in the background while I'm doing other things. I like a lot of the 00s hard trance, early hardstyle and otherwise harder dance styles of EDM still, but I don't identify with that music, I just like it. I listen to a lot of synthwave, but again, that's not musically interesting enough to really hold my interest; I just like it as backing soundtracks to what's otherwise going on. Trying to listen to it to appreciate it for its musicality doesn't really work. I also like a lot of para-ambient stuff that evokes a mood for reading or for RPGs; the unofficial YouTube soundtracks of Cthulhu or D&D stuff. But again, musically it's not usually interesting enough to hold my interest for its own sake. 

I'm also finding that my appreciation for classical music has come to the foreground once again. I've always loved classical music, but I don't always listen to a lot of it day to day. Lately, I've found myself drawn to it more and more. And, of course, musically classical music offers quite a bit more than any kind of popular music anyway. I may yet find myself primarily a classical music fan before I die. Orchestral movie soundtracks, at their best, offer a portion of what classical offers, but again; musically it usually isn't as rich.

Unlike the Boomers, while I'll always like the pop music of my generation, I'm unlikely to try and make the narcissistic case that it's some kind of pop music gold standard, better than anything before or since. I identify with it because of my age cohort, and I don't expect any other age cohort to think my generation's pop music is the best. The Boomers never got that, and still try and tell us that the Beatles or Bob Dylan are the bestest music ever, which makes people of my generation and younger just push back even harder the more we hear that kind of nonsense. And if there's anything that generations younger than the boomers have learned, it's to to not be like the boomers.

EDIT: Although I wonder; probably a big part of the problem was trying to do the entire catalog all at once. If I did an album here and album there, and maybe even put it on repeat and listened to it two or three times before finishing, kinda like how I did when I was younger, the experience would probably have been significantly less tedious. 

In any case, I started doing some remix and cover version collections of my favorite tracks, starting with "Never Let Me Down Again", and I queued up all the versions of "But Not Tonight" that I have after that. Assuming I'm still in the mood after I near the end of that queue, I'll add "Enjoy the Silence" and "If You Want" and a few others after that. 

Physical media and Depeche Mode soundalikes

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.

Memento Mori show

Although the tour has been expanded to have more shows, including at least one that would have been easier for me to get to, my wife bought tickets for the Memento Mori Depeche Mode concert in Chicago back when there were very few shows. That's OK. Because it was Wednesday of the week of Good Friday, I took a few days of vacation and turned a three day weekend into a five day weekend, and we just spent some time in Chicago doing Chicago things. It was fun for a while, until sleeping in an admittedly pretty bad hotel bed (don't know why it was so hard, and why we ended up on a queen instead of a king... and why they didn't have any extra pillows, or... well, anyway. Big city stuff.)

We both were pretty exhausted by the end of it due to poor sleep. My wife tends to get a migraine when traveling if she's not careful anyway, and it started hitting her on Good Friday. By Saturday, she was pretty much out of luck when it came to having energy to do anything except eventually travel back home. Frankly, I was kind of tired too, but more importantly, I was over being in Chicago, being stuck to places that I could walk to or having to take an Uber, the noise, the smell, the concrete, the crowds, the racist ranting of some black power group on the sidewalk, etc. I am fundamentally not an urban guy.

Anyway, needless to say, the Depeche Mode concert was the night of our first full day in Chicago, so I wasn't tired of being there yet, or tired in any sense. It was kind of exciting still at that stage. The Depeche Mode audience is kinda funny. Although I did see some younger people there, by far the majority of the people with tickets were at least 40 years old, and the average age may well have been around 50. (I just turned 51 a couple of months ago myself, and my wife will turn 50 later this year. Our average age is right there too.) Depeche Mode themselves, now that they're down to officially two members and two live musicians, are both 61, I believe. Christian Eigner (the live drummer) and Peter Gordeno (the live keyboard player) have both been playing with Depeche Mode since the late 90s in their live show (the Ultra era, basically) and are probably about the same age too, give or take a few years. Wikipedia lists Gordeno's age as 59, and doesn't list one for Eigner. 

Anyway, I was concerned that with their age, the show would feel kind of tired and... well, old, quite honestly. Luckily, that wasn't the case. Dave isn't as athletic as he was in the 80s, or even the mid 00s when I saw the Playing the Angel tour, but he's still pretty spry and charismatic on stage. Nobody else has ever had much of a stage presence to speak of anyway. Martin is just kinda there, walking around slowly and singing and playing in the background. When he does his solos, he just stands there and sings them and counts on the merits of the song to carry him through. Fletch never did much on stage either. He played a keyboard, and clapped and did some background dancing a bit and vocals here and there, I guess. Curiously, on stage, he wasn't missed. Nobody replaced him, so either his parts (usually the baseline, I gather) were recorded and played that way, or Gardeno or someone else could play them in addition to what he was playing already. Although it might seem gauche to say it after he passed away unexpectedly last year, but it brings up the specter even more starkly that people had been asking for years; what exactly did he do for the band? It did seem like some of the background vocals were missing, but I think the mixing of Gardeno trying to sing them just wasn't good, and I couldn't hear it very well.

I read a review on Amazon for the book Stripped by Jonathan Miller, which is the definitive history of the band. I read at least part of the book myself a couple of years ago, although as we got past the Violator era, I was much less interested. If I read a blow by blow, as best it could be constructed, of why Alan left in the middle of the 90s, I don't remember any details of it, so I'm left with the stuff that I already knew. In his statement, he mentions working conditions and workload distribution, which is widely seen as a polite yet pointed way of suggesting that he was doing a lot of work, Fletch wasn't pulling his weight, and maybe they just didn't really get along all that well. The review I read, which was written in 2019, before Fletch died, suggested what I've always believed that Fletch was kind of arrogant and dismissive about Alan leaving. Possibly brought on by a kind of insecurity or "imposter syndrome" given that clearly Alan was contributing much more than Fletch was, and I can't believe that Fletch didn't know that. If anything, in the fanbase, that sentiment has reached exaggerated proportions, and Alan's contribution has become this kind of mythical legendary utopia. Depeche Mode fanboys are as likely to be Alan Wilder fanboys as anything else, and frequently suggest that the band is a shell of what it used to be since he left. 

This isn't exactly what I think, but I also think that there's something to it. If you listen to Martin Gore's demo of "Enjoy the Silence", where it's just him singing it like a dirge over a stripped down organ accompaniment, it's not really very interesting. It's the same song as the one we're more familiar with... but also not at all the same song. Martin Gore is a good song-writer, a notable songwriter of his generation, even. But sometimes that isn't sufficient in and of itself. Without Alan Wilder to interpret the songs, they may or may not amount to much. I've said earlier that other producers and partners could also do what Wilder used to do, and do a credible job, but do they have the force of personality to do so, especially when they are hired guns who are not nearly as big a name as Depeche Mode themselves are? That's debatable. Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones could do that, in part because when they worked with them, Depeche Mode were younger and less experienced. Alan could do it. The story of him and Flood convincing Martin to do "Enjoy the Silence" the way that they did is a prime example of it. I think that the role Alan Wilder, Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones played in developing Depeche Mode's sound is understated. Miller in particular was on board from the beginning and didn't step back until Music For the Masses. Gareth Jones rebuilt their sound and technological approach through the trio of Construction Time Again, Some Great Reward and Black Celebration. And Wilder, who came on board during the A Broken Frame period quickly learned and dived heavily into the production and arranging side of things, working very closely with Miller and Jones until he didn't need to anymore because he could do it himself. 

Wilder was still around for Songs of Faith and Devotion, though, where the band transformed itself, or at least picked up a lot of early 90s pop culture detritus, and the band second-guessed who they were, for at least a time. While I'm not a fan of the direction SOFAD went, it does feel that the albums after that were a bit more lifeless, even when they returned (somewhat) to a more familiar sound. But since Wilder left, most of the tracks released sound like filler tracks, honestly. The ratio of good to filler has plummeted. For most albums, Angel admittedly excepted, it's good if there are one or two memorable tracks on the album. I don't know if Gore is phoning it in on the writing, or if he really does need Wilder to interpret his songs into something better than mediocre for most of them. I could imagine both scenarios being true.

Anyway, I'm getting rambly about the history of the band, so I'll cut it short, put an old picture of the band up for visual interest and move on. Basically, I'm just establishing context that I greatly prefer earlier Depeche Mode. Violator was the last Depeche Mode album that I really liked, although I'll admit that there have been some really good top tier songs that have come out since Violator, like "Wrong" and "Precious" and I wasn't unhappy with the fact that they played a few songs from the new album, mostly the better songs like "My Cosmos Is Mine", "Wagging Tongues" and especially "Ghosts Again." Essentially, my ideal setlist wouldn't be all that different from the 101 setlist, except maybe take away "Something to Do", "The Things You Said", "Nothing", and "Pleasure Little Treasure" and replace them with "Enjoy the Silence", "Personal Jesus", "Wrong", "Precious" and "Ghosts Again." Maybe to surprise us, we could get the two Ultra tracks that were played, or if they really wanted to surprise us, I'd love to have heard "The Sun & The Rainfall" or "But Not Tonight." So, I didn't get my ideal setlist, but mostly the setlist wasn't bad.

A Broken Frame, Some Great Reward, Exciter, Delta Machine, and Spirit all had no tracks in the setlist. Honestly, though, only Some Great Reward was kind of surprising there. When I last saw Depeche Mode in 2005, they still played "Somebody", and I thought that they considered that one of their real classics and a must-play.

Playing the Angel was well-represented. Three songs is quite a bit for an album that long ago. There were only five from the new album. This suggests to me that I was right to think that it was a high point in terms of popularity with the audience. In spite of persistent anecdotal evidence that I find to the latter. There were five songs from SOFAD, because for my setlist, they changed "Waiting For the Night To Fall" to "Condemnation." That's a little unfortunate, not only because I don't love that album, but I especially don't like that song. If that's what they think is a good replacement for the classic "Somebody" I'm very disappointed in that decision and whomever made it.

The setlist had a kind of momentum to it. I don't know that my wife was really enjoying it all that much until the second half, honestly, but she's not as big a fan as me, and knows few songs post Violator. But even me, and it feels like the audience energy in general, picked up as the set went on, and certainly peaked with some of the real classics of the 80s and earliest 90s; all Violator or earlier tracks, especially "World In My Eyes" (which benefits from the emotional tug of being dedicated to Fletch and having his image on the big screen), "Enjoy the Silence", "Never Let Me Down Again," "Just Can't Get Enough" and "Personal Jesus." A bit earlier in the show, the energy around "Everything Counts", "Precious," and "Ghosts Again" was pretty high too. Smack in the middle of those tracks was "John the Revelator" which didn't really wind the audience up much, and "Condemnation" which got some cheers, but mostly felt like the audience was enduring rather than enjoying. I really quite enjoyed "Wrong" but the audience reaction was a bit muted. I don't think many people know the lyrics, and it's not really a very danceable tempo is the explanation, though.

Anyway, it was a good show. Expensive as all get-out; our mediocre seats went for something like $200 each. But let's be real. At this point, it's likely that this is the last time I will ever attempt to see them. I'm glad that I did, and I'm glad that I saw Angel some 18 years or so ago too. I don't regret going. What I regret was that I didn't go earlier when I had the chance in the late 80s or early 90s. I was probably too young for the Masses tour for my parents to have let me go in '88, but I could probably have swung the Violator tour if I'd thought that I'd wanted to, and I could certainly have swung the SOFAD tour; heck, my little brother went, and I could have gone with. But the masses tour is the one that I'd most want to have seen.

UPDATE: I've also decided where to place Memento Mori in the forced rankings. Here is the updated chart for that over here on the side too.

Memento Mori's position

So... I've made some slight updates to be more in line with my opinion to my old Depeche Mode album forced ranking. Here's the ranking as shown.

I think it's pretty self-explanatory; the ranking starts at the top with the lowest ranked album, and it gets better as we move down the file. The score is a relative one, not an absolute one. And I may yet flip Exciter and Spirit's place, although that probably doesn't matter that much.

More by coincidence than by any other reason, the albums break out into three chunks; a low, medium and high ranked chunk with each chunk being more or less equivalent in size.

The low ranked chunk is mostly made up of recent albums; with "recent" again being relevant, and more based on style than on actual recentish date. It includes Exciter, Spirit, Delta Machine, Sounds of the Universe, and Songs of Faith and Devotion. I know, I know—SOFAD had mainstream popularity, and Alan Wilder wasn't even gone yet! So what? It was the album that kicked off the "modern" album phase, with a lot of 90s zeitgeist toxins in it. Loads of noisiness and feedback, and grunge and fuzz. And the weirdo gospel influences, which I've never for the life of me understood.

The middle chunk, as I've said before, are all very different from each other, and the daylight between them can only be determined by photo finish. I've actually shuffled them a bit from where I'd originally placed them, but that shouldn't be seen as evidence that my opinion on them or my esteem for them has really changed much. These albums are Playing the Angel, which although it belongs to the modern group is the best of them, Ultra, which is a weird kind of pseudo-modern and pseudo-throwback album, Speak & Spell, which is essentially a different group altogether, given how much Vince Clark's influence was all through it, and A Broken Frame and Construction Time Again, where Martin Gore and Co. were trying to find their feet and their sound without Clark. 

The top tier albums are Violator, Some Great Reward, Black Celebration, and Music for the Masses, in that order. I know most people would probably put Violator at the top of that heap, but I think its actually the least of the top tier albums for various reasons.

The real question too, of course, is where is the new album Memento Mori going to fit in here? It's still probably too early for me to make that determination with confidence, but I am pretty sure that it's going to end up in the middle chunk. It's, along with Playing the Angel, the best of the newer albums, and the best album since Playing the Angel. Whether I think i's actually better than Angel or not I'm not sure yet. Like many of the newer album, it only has one contender for a real top tier song, and I don't know for sure if I think "Ghosts Again" is going to make the cut as a truly top tier song or not. It's clearly the best on the album, and by a wide margin. The real determination is how does the rest of the "album filler" stack up? I think it's better than most. But I'll have to listen to it many more times before I'm certain where I think it belongs.

Memento Mori drops

Well, Depeche Mode's Memento Mori dropped. On a whim, I pre-ordered it from Amazon, so I'll get a physical CD copy later today sometime, but meanwhile, I've listened to the whole album once now on YouTube, and I'll probably play it a couple more times today. The million dollar question; is it any good?

I don't know yet. I'll need to digest it a bit more. I guess that means that it wasn't so good that I immediately thought it accessibly great, like I would have if it sounded more like Music for the Masses, for example (for a more recent example, De/Vision's Popgefahr did that) but it's also not so bad that I'm immediately put off by it either. I have a funny feeling that I'll end up thinking that it's kind of bland. It ditched a lot of the affectations that I didn't like in a lot of the "late phase" Depeche Mode (which I consider everything after Ultra—although maybe I should go all the way back to Songs of Faith and Devotion; I could certainly make a case for it). Well, that's good, I suppose. But they weren't really all that bold with anything that they did that was good, either. And some of the songs are iffy. There's your obligatory awkward and sometimes almost grotesque Martin Gore ballad, for instance. "Caroline's Monkey" is just strange in every way. 

Anyway, on to play it again and see if anything unexpected grows on me. But I don't think so. I think I'll end up finding this an album that played it pretty safe, didn't do much that I didn't like, but didn't do much that I did either.

I've only seen Depeche Mode in person once before; nearly 20 years ago at the Palace in Detroit on the Playing the Angel tour. The setlist for that show was the following:

1. Intro
2. A Pain That I'm Used To
3. John the Revelator
4. A Question of Time
5. Policy of Truth
6. Precious
7. Walking in My Shoes
8. Suffer Well
9. Damaged People
10. Home
11. I Want It All
12. The Sinner in Me
13. I Feel You
14. Behind the Wheel
15. World in My Eyes
16. Personal Jesus
17. Enjoy the Silence

Encore:

1. Somebody
2. Just Can't Get Enough
3. Everything Counts

Encore 2:

1. Never Let Me Down Again
2. Goodnight Lovers

A decent setlist for the time. Obviously, heavily leaning on Playing the Angel songs, some of which I could take or leave, but still there was enough 80s material to make me happy, and I don't hate the 90s material that much, especially the Violator classics like "Enjoy the Silence" or "Personal Jesus." 

I'm going to also see this new tour in Chicago (for the curious, I don't live in either Detroit or Chicago; those are just the shows I went to or am going to) and so obviously the setlist isn't out yet for that show, but the Sacramento show was last night, and it was the first show of this tour. Here's the setlist for that show:

1. Speak to Me (Outro) (This is the final song on the new album)
2. My Cosmos Is Mine (This is the opening song of the new album. I'm mixed so far in my reaction to it)
3. Wagging Tongue (another new track from early on the album playlist, and so far I'm thinking one of the better ones.)
4. Walking in My Shoes (I knew they had to play a bunch of SOFAD songs, because a lot of the fans want to hear them, but I could skip this and not feel bad at all.)
5. It's No Good
6. Sister of Night (A couple of Ultra songs in a row? Surprising. I mean, I could miss them, but it's still nice to see them playing something unexpected. They're also saying that "Sister of Night" was not acoustic and had Dave sing the vocals rather than Martin. Curiouser and curiouser. I wonder if these are some of the ones that they play around with show to show, though. Imagine if we got something like "But Not Tonight" or "The Sun and the Rainfall!"
7. In Your Room (Zephyr Mix) (Eh. More SOFAD. OK.)
8. Everything Counts (They've been doing this as an encore song for so long, it's a bit surprising to see it here. At least they're playing it.)
9. Precious
10. Speak to Me (It looks like they're using the outro to this song as the intro to the concert, so... OK.)
11. A Question of Lust (first time since November 15, 2017) (Another pleasant surprise to hear an 80s song that hasn't been played much in the last few decades. I probably would much rather have heard "A Question of Time", but sometimes you take what you can get.)
12. Soul With Me (Another new one, that I didn't love. The typical Martin Gore ballad that you have to just endure and hope that it doesn't last too long.)
13. Ghosts Again (Well, hardly surprising. Pretty sure that this song will stay at the top as the best song of the album.)
14. I Feel You (Probably my favorite of the SOFAD songs. I'd still rather hear something from the 80s, like "Strangelove" here, or "People Are People"—which I know, I know, they don't like to play—but I'd rather hear it.)
15. A Pain That I'm Used To (Jacques Lu Cont's Remix) (This is an OK song, but the Jazques Lu Cont baseline is not my favorite. It kind of destroys the structure of the song, and makes the chorus indistinguishable from the verse. Blegh. Don't know why they're playing this version of it.)
16. World in My Eyes (Dedicated to Andrew Fletcher) (I know it's kind of a hit single from their commercial peak and all that, but I've always thought this song was kind of forgettable and I wouldn't have minded them forgetting it. Maybe it was one of Fletch's favorites or something.)
17. Wrong (Very pleasant surprise. An underrated top tier song, in my opinion.)
18. Stripped
19. John the Revelator (another Playing the Angel song? Curious.)
20. Enjoy the Silence

Encore:

1. Waiting for the Night (first time since November 21, 2009) (This one is surprising. I do like this song well enough. Don't even know what it would sound like live.
2. Just Can't Get Enough (They don't ever not play this, as far as I know.)
3. Never Let Me Down Again
4. Personal Jesus (Weird that these two are in the encore, but I'd have been very disappointed not to hear them, especially "Never Let Me Down Again."

I know it sounds kind of kitschy, because if I had a time-travelling DeLorean, there seems like so many better things to see. But I'd especially love to go see the Music For the Masses tour. I know, I know—I could just watch 101 or something. But I'd like to see several shows, and buy a couple of the t-shirts. And frankly, that was what I think their peak was. And the setlist wasn't always the same. During the three Texas shows, which is where I was living at the time, they played "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth" for instance, a really surprising entry.

Some scattershot updates

I've got three things to talk about briefly, and all of them are relatively small, so I'll combine them in a single post, even though the topics have very little to do with each other.

First

I had said earlier, on the date it was released, that Depeche Mode's new song "Ghosts Again" was a contender for being a top tier DM song. I played it for my wife last weekend, and she said it was "Ok." Am I overvaluing it? Not sure. I'm kind of in a weird situation with Depeche Mode. After many years of being disappointed in their output—since Violator honestly, which I know is very popular, but which I thought was overall a step down from Music For the Masses and Black Celebration which I still consider the best DM albums. This trajectory of disappointment has fallen off precipitously. While Violator was a weird style with lots of hoaky steel guitar, and relatively fewer good songs (admittedly, the good songs are quite good, and "Enjoy the Silence" is the most iconic Depeche Mode song of all time) most later albums are considerably worse. Exciter, Spirit, and Delta Machine are the bottom tier albums. After this more extreme disappointment, I was probably in a position where even a halfway decent song was going to make me happy. But over time, how well it stands next to other top tier songs will be more apparent. It is possible that I've overvalued it because relative to what it could have been, it didn't disappoint me. But it's not going to fall from being a top tier contender to being part of the mediocre pack. It'll just not push over the top into the top tier, and will remain in the "second tier" if it is less than I found it initially. I'm still optimistic that with more time and more to compare it to, it'll remain a favorite. 

One of these days, I'll have to decide what I think the complete list of "top tier" songs is, and how many can actually qualify. By my count and utilizing the b-sides and other rarities, there's about 263 Depeche Mode songs currently, including "Ghosts Again." We don't have a tracklist for Memento Mori yet, so I don't know what that will expand to but somewhere between 270-275 most likely. If I consider that Depeche Mode's top tier output can't be more than about 5% of that, or about 13-14 songs. But that's when Memento Mori comes out; today, I have to keep it at 12-13. 

For my first pass, let's include: "Just Can't Get Enough", "Everything Counts", "If You Want" (yes, that's a very personal and esoteric choice), "Blasphemous Rumours", "Stripped", "But Not Tonight", "Never Let Me Down Again", "Behind the Wheel", "Enjoy the Silence", "Precious", "Shake the Disease", and "Wrong."

I could have maybe fit one or two more, but let's save them for the Second Tier; songs like "Oh Well", "Strangelove", "Somebody", "People Are People", "World Full of Nothing", "Personal Jesus", "Blue Dress", "The Sun & the Rainfall", "Leave in Silence", "New Life", "Photographic", "Sacred", and maybe "I Sometimes Wish I Was Dead."

Second

I think my latest post is probably as close as I need to get to preparing to run the lead-in to the CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER game. There's some minor "director's commentary" or GM's notes I should add, just to explain how this works. I have three low-level human entries in the monsters and foes section. All of them are low level threats; a human commoner, a human warrior, and an elite warrior. Still only about a 2nd level character, or the equivalent of one, more or less. Throwing a few spells on him is sufficient. 

I probably don't need much more in terms of NPC stats that this for much of the entire run of CIW. I'm really starting to believe that the entirety of the campaign would have the PCs at only 1st and 2nd level. If I use the same characters for a second campaign, it would be 2nd and 3rd (CULT OF UNDEATH?) and if I use the same characters for MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTE, which would be remarkable, that campaign would be 4th and 5th, and maybe just for the heckuvit, I'd let them do the last few sessions as 6th level. 

For those higher levels in the next campaigns, I probably want to have some more difficult threats, but I'm largely not too worried about them for quite a long time. I'm also not very concerned with replicating anything at all like CR matching; if monsters are difficult, then players should be prepared for that. In fact, they'll very specifically be ready for the servitor daemons, because they will have killed the pseudo-PCs already. If that doesn't inspire the players to find some kind of strategy to be successful more involved than "I attack it with my sword", then it's on them if they TPK early on.

Third

I don't believe much of what I hear in the Hasbro earnings report. I don't believe that the D&D Beyond cancellations haven't had a notable effect on earnings, or if they haven't, it's a timing issue and it'll hit in the next quarter. Maybe its true, but if so, that just suggests that D&D in general isn't a huge earner for WotC, nor does it have the potential to be. I also believe that Baldur's Gate 3 is going to underperform relative to their projections. It's been in early release for three years already; how many people really want to play it that haven't yet? Plus, the black woman main character having a lesbian kiss with a surprisingly kind of not  all that attractive elfin the trailer is a major turnoff. I don't think that the D&D audience, or the video game audience is all that woke, really. We'll see. Last of Us 2 doesn't seem to have been all that successful ,and got a lot of bad press. Not all of that was from the wokeness of the game, but a lot of it is.

I also don't think that the movie is going to be a big success. It has the look of a made-for-tv movie with an aging star, who only is cast to be made fun of anyway.

Screw you, D&D, and screw you WotC, and screw you Hasbro.

Ghosts Again

I am coming to consider Depeche Mode a band of the past. Oh, of course I know that they've been around all along, but very little of what they've put out in the last 30 years or so has really impressed me that much. The Playing the Angel and Ultra albums were relatively good. Songs of Faith and Devotion had a few good songs. They haven't added very many "top tier" songs to their repertoire since Violator though. "Wrong", "Precious", "It's No Good", "Martyr", and maybe b-sides "Ghost" and "Oh Well". Maybe a few other tracks here and there are almost good enough to be top tier.

It's early, but so far I'm considering the newly dropped single (just three hours ago!) "Ghosts Again" from the upcoming Memento Mori album might qualify. So far, very good. 

I particularly appreciate how Dave is singing more normally. He's had a really affected style to his vocals in recent years, like he's trying to be a bluesy, rocky torch icon. I haven't really liked it. Granted, his voice has probably been somewhat damaged by the abuse that he's subjected himself to, and I don't expect it to sound now when he's in his 60s like he did 35 years ago barely into his 20s. But, apparently he can sound more like that than he's chosen to, because it's a bit more classic here.

I know Depeche Mode have kind of changed their tone, themes and sound over the decades too, but listening to a live stream from Vaughn George, someone in the chat made a good point, which he picked up on and talked about too—it kind of has a b-side vibe to it. The b-sides were often where Depeche Mode wandered a little further afield from their "trademark sound" and did stuff a little bit more experimental, or sometimes less experimental and more poppy. 

The video is unusual also in that it kind of looks like it was filmed on some leftover 80s set. I can't find the video now, but there was one of them—I thought it was an alternate video for "But Not Tonight" that looks very similar, if not even almost recycled. On the other hand, Martin and Dave—but especially Martin—are looking really quite old. Man, what happened to his face in the last few years? He almost looks closer to 80 than to 60. His face almost looks older than my dad's, and I'm only about ten years younger than Depeche Mode themselves.

Anyway, after many years of disappointment with what was once my favorite band, I'm cautiously optimistic after this quite good start.

My wife got me tickets to their upcoming show, in just a couple of months. It's likely that this is their swan song, although we'll see. It's very unlikely I'll see them again, and it's very unlikely that their show will be like their shows in the past, just because they're getting so much older. They're not even doing a third of the stops on this tour that they did for Angel. Alan left the band decades ago now, and Fletch died during the covid nonsense "suddenly." Make of that what you will. The last time I saw them was quite a long time ago now, during the Playing the Angel tour. One last hurrah for both them and me, in a way. 

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. 

RIP Andy Fletcher

I missed this, because I'm terrible at keeping up with pop culture news... on purpose... but apparently Andy Fletcher, one of the true founding members of Depeche Mode from before even they were Depeche Mode, died a week or so ago at age 60 of "natural causes" in his home.

It's probably a bit gauche to ask if he had the Covid vaccine. Besides, I'm sure he did. 

Fletch was a bit notorious near the end as the "unproductive" member of the band, and it was a running joke that he had little role other than to clap from time to time, but of course that wasn't really true. His true calling just wasn't with the musical side, but rather with the management of the band. But he was there from the start; when Depeche Mode first started... and they weren't even Depeche Mode yet, it was two high school friends, Vince Clark (or Vince Martin, his real name) and Andy Fletcher putting together a band called No Romance in China influenced by the Cure. Only later, after hearing some of the very early OMD stuff did they get involved in becoming an electronic act, recruit Martin Gore and last of all Dave Gahan, to form their initial line-up under their initial name.

Now, it's been five years since Depeche Mode released anything, the bitter, and frankly kind of crappy pseudo-politico-social virtue-sniveling Spirit, which does not seem to have been particularly well-received. (I don't like it very much. Then again, I don't like much of what they've done since Ultra at least, other than Playing the Angel and even then, I'd go back to Music for the Masses since they produced something that I really liked.) With Fletcher now dead, I think it's an open question if they'll ever record again. With Fletch's death, there are now more former Depeche Mode members than there are current members. Personally, I kind of feel like they shouldn't. For the most part, as near as I can tell, fans who still talk publicly about their fandom, such as we are, kind of feel like they've hurt their own legacy by going beyond when they should have quit, and they've gone in a different direction in most respects than their own fandom. The concept of quitting while you're ahead seems to be a lost art. 

I suppose this isn't a very tasteful or tactful tribute post, honestly. But it is what it is. I do find myself grateful that my wife took me to see the band in 2005 on the Playing the Angel tour. While I'd have been happy to see them again after that date, I also feel like that was probably the last pretty good tour. And I'm also chuffed that I didn't go see the Devotional tour, because I was available to see it, and my younger brother even went, but it didn't seem important to me at that time. And the Masses tour! It totally hadn't occurred to me to go to concerts in 1988, and I wasn't really all that familiar with their work yet anyway. But that's the one I wish I could take my time-traveling DeLorean to go back and see. Sigh. I'll see about playing through the best three albums: Some Great Reward, Black Celebration, and Music for the Masses while coddling a drink (I don't drink; I mean a Vernors or something) and being thoughtful tonight.

And in spite my feelings about the decline in their music over the last three decades from their high point in 1987 (1987!) and my other personal feelings about having learned about the weird, unlikeable and antisocial behavior of Gore and Gahan in particular, I still feel a little... I dunno, it's a shame, isn't it? Fletch always seemed like the decent guy of the bunch, along with Alan Wilder. Kind of the peacemaker in some ways among the band when tensions arose. I know he had his problems with anxiety and alcoholism...and frankly, it's a shame that we know that. One of the things that I used to really respect about Depeche Mode in the 80s and early 90s is that we didn't really know much about them personally, and that's a good thing. Like all entertainers everywhere from every era of human history, once you get to know what they're like behind the scenes, it's not often a pretty picture. They were born for the stage, and if only that's all that we knew of them!

Sigh. I can't seem to write a decent tribute without throwing in jabs about the things about our culture which they partially represented about which I've become bitter and cynical myself. Maybe I should take my own advice and quit while I'm ahead, or at least not keep digging myself in deeper.

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.

Depeche Mode Rankings Podcast Episode: 0 — Establishing Context

https://anchor.fm/joshua-dyal/episodes/Episode-0-Giving-the-Depeche-Mode-reviews-context-e8rj6g

An hour and a half of me talking into my phone while sitting in my car about Depeche Mode in preparation for the detailed, annotated album rankings.  This episode is all about establishing some context before I rank them, about me, about the band, about its history, about my musical tastes, etc.

If you have any interest at all in listening to the rankings (I've recorded two, and they are both over half an hour each.  Sigh.  I'll get those annotated review podcasts out soon, but first; the context...

I've also added the first two reviews; album 14 of 14 and 13 of 14, by my ranking.  I'm not going to continue to post on the blog everytime I add an episode of the podcast review, but I did put a page link to the Depeche Mode reviews over there along the top row, and I'll make sure and update there when new episodes are available.  This way, it'll keep my gaming blog from getting too gummed upw with talk about Depeche Mode (too late!) although that's where I'm working right now, so the blog posts will probably just happen a little less frequently until this project is complete.

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.