Icon: Depeche Mode
Depeche Mode is one of the unlikeliest success stories of fin-de-siecle rock: a band that rose from humble (if inspired) synth-pop origins to become an arena-filling behemoth, with a stature nearly on par with the likes of R.E.M. or U2, by virtue of what might seem to be insurmountable contractions and obstacles. They’ve flirted with androgyny, yet bare-chested singer Dave Gahan is one of the most macho frontmen in the last few decades. They’ve embraced country twang, glam-rock shuffle and alt-metal guitars without ever abandoning the taut synthesizer sequences of their earliest recordings. They’ve weathered bitter personnel changes, heroin addiction and an attempted suicide. Their lyrics have plumbed the depths of bathos, to the point of verging on self-parody. And yet, through it all, they have turned out a catalog of bona fide pop classics known and loved the world over, turning their twin obsessions with vice and spirituality into an unstoppable creative engine. Not all Depeche Mode albums are equal; there have been mean streaks and low spells, and for a moment in the early ’90s, it looked like the band had hit its creative peak. But every album has yielded its share of classic moments, adding up to one of the most diverse, dynamic repertoires in the last three decades of pop.
From Most To Least Essential
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While there's no single definitive Depeche Mode album - fans' favorites invariably depend in some part upon when they discovered the band - 1990's Violator is certainly the cornerstone of their popularity. Having cemented a growing fanbase with the late '80s albums Black Celebration and Music for the Masses, the band made good on the latter album's title with Violator, breaking into the top 10 ranks of the Billboard 200 for the... first time, thanks to its dark, brooding electronic production and some of the most compelling songwriting of the band's career.
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According to an online database that tracks covers of Depeche Mode's songs, two Violator singles, "Enjoy the Silence" and "Personal Jesus," rank as the band's most frequently interpreted songs. (At last count, they had been covered 191 times and 123 times, respectively.) It's not hard to see why. The curious chord changes of "Enjoy the Silence" suggest a sense of insatiable yearning, even as the lyrics - "All I ever wanted, all I ever needed/ Is here in my arms" - propose a perfect union. (One of Dave Gahan's strengths as a vocalist is the ability to make even the most trite, adolescent cheese seem profound. Who else could deliver on a "highest mountain"/"deepest sea" metaphor the way he does on "World in My Eyes"?) "Personal Jesus," meanwhile, is one of those freaky pop phenomena for which there's probably no explanation, fusing glam rock shuffle, bluesy twang and techno stomp into a song conflating religious faith, romantic love and drug addiction. -
Classic. Untouchable. Violator may be the canonical fave, but there's plenty of evidence in favor of Music for the Masses as Depeche Mode's greatest album. Swinging from singalong anthems like "Strangelove" to the meditative "I Want You Now" and the cod-classical studio creation "Pimpf," the record covers more ground than ever before, but it never feels disjointed, its arc smoothed by a swollen cushion of synthesizers and backing vocals. The band's emotional... range is wider than ever, from the intimate betrayal of "The Things You Said" to the self-affirming melancholy of "Never Let Me Down Again"; "Strangelove" finds the group continuing to eke an unnatural brilliance out of minor-key progressions, while "Nothing" uses spine-tingling keyboards and vocal harmonies to render nihilistic fantasies in an unusually visceral fashion. And then there's "Behind the Wheel," a luscious, shuddering fusion of Kraftwerk, J.G. Ballard and America's mythical open roads that single-handedly establishes the blueprint for the electroclash and electro-house anthems of two decades hence.
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The 1984 album that first broke Depeche Mode for a growing "alternative" listenership in North America, Some Great Reward is best known for the hits "Master and Servant" and "People Are People," whose wry social commentary doubtless resonated with the goths, new wavers, gay clubbers and disaffected teens that populated the band's fanbase. (The former lasciviously compares S&M sex-play with "reality" itself; the latter is a legendary mess of heavy-handed diversity awareness... redeemed only by its clanging, irresistibly catchy pop-industrial production.) There's something almost shamelessly overwrought about much of the record's emotional tone, from the stone-faced ballad "It Doesn't Matter" to the soggy torch song "Somebody," which contains some of the dumbest couplets Depeche Mode ever managed ("Though my views may be wrong, they may even be perverted/ she'll hear me out and won't easily be converted").
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But the cheese turns out to be an essential part of the album's charm, culminating in the brilliant closer "Blasphemous Rumours," which traces a 16-year-old would-be suicide through spiritual rebirth, car accident and coma to conclude that God's love is a malicious joke. (Along with the Cure's "Killing an Arab," the song no doubt played no small role in introducing a generation of sullen teens to existentialism.) And underpinning it all was some of the most thrilling songwriting and production of the band's career yet, translating the spiky, metallic sound of Construction Time Again into an even fuller soundscape of dissonant samples and buoyant synthesizers. "Lie to Me," with its disco bass line, might be the funkiest thing the group ever recorded, while the eerie loops and background noises of "Blasphemous Rumours" translated Cabaret Voltaire's ambient/industrial strain of musique concrete into pure pop. -
1995 and 1996 weren't great years for Depeche Mode. Alan Wilder left the band. Dave Gahan, hooked on a heroin habit he'd picked up during the Violator tour, cycled in and out of detox. His wife left him, he survived a half-hearted suicide attempt and then, in an irony right out of "Blasphemous Rumours," overdosed on a speedball, flatlining for two minutes before paramedics revived him. (To add insult to injury, he... found himself handcuffed and facing controlled-substance charges.)
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And then, improbably, with Gahan sober (and, for the first time, taking vocal lessons), the group took to the studio and re-discovered its confidence. Muscular studio drumming and slash-and-burn guitars build upon the previous album's rock foundation, but here the songwriting - especially on songs like "Barrel of a Gun" and "Useless" - achieves its anthemic aims thanks to a newfound sense of focus. Producer Tim Simenon, known for his trip-hop project Bomb the Bass as well as production for the likes of Neneh Cherry, helps restore the lost audacity of the band's sound with touches of dub and abstract electronics. -
Vince Clarke had left Depeche Mode by the time of 1982's A Broken Frame, and it shows: while the band still pursues a minimalist agenda in its spindly synthesizer lines and whittled-down drum programming, the songwriting takes a darker turn, with plangent arpeggios replacing melodies that had formerly hiccupped like popper hits. Learning a thing or two from more experimental antecedents like Cabaret Voltaire, Gore and Gahan stepped cautiously away from their... presets and began exploring the expressive potential of their synthesizers: "Leave In Silence" uses dub delay and detuned syn-drums to complement eerie vocal harmonies and unusual chord changes, turning a straightforward pop ditty into a forest of ice and melted wax. It's hard to imagine records like the Knife's Silent Shout without songs like "Monument." "Shouldn't Have Done That," meanwhile, anticipates the spooky melancholia of future Depeche Mode classics like "Somebody" and "I Want You Now."
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Depeche Mode's third album, and the first to feature the talented arranger Alan Wilder as a full-time member, Construction Time Again closes chapter one of the band's career. The skeletal arrangements and finely honed synthesizer tones of the first two albums repeat themselves here; the industrial percussion and fattened bass of Some Great Reward are audible in songs like "Love in Itself" and "Pipeline," but a minimalist chill hangs over prickly arpeggios... and rigid drum sequences. The dirgelike "Pipeline," featuring chain-gang chants, Steve Reich-inspired mallet percussion and zippy ping-pong ball effects, is one of the band's most sonically satisfying songs. (One might even wish for an alternate reality where the band had followed this course to an entirely different place; fortunately, Portishead and Massive Attack eventually charted that terrain for us.) The clear album highlight is "Everything Counts," a beautiful example of the group's love of contradictions, as well as one of its most memorable melodies. It's a treatise on capitalist greed, played on Japanese synthesizers programmed to sound (more or less) like medieval English folk music - set to a grinding, death-disco beat.
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Following 1997's Ultra, Depeche Mode took an unexpected turn, largely abandoning the guitar-heavy swagger of the previous two albums and, under the direction of producer Mark Bell (of the techno act LFO), putting synthesizers and drum machines at the fore once again. It's not all bleeps and loops; they return to their Americana obsessions with the bluesy "The Sweetest Condition," and electric guitars add grit and body to standout tracks like "Dream... On," "Shine" and "Breathe." But the balance of the mix is given over to a porous, powerful mixture of purring drum machines and state-of-the-art sound synthesis, ranging from bracing techno ("I Feel Loved") to dub-inflected downtempo ("I Am You"). The billowing production provides the perfect foundation for Gahan's increasingly confident vocals, which nestle in like crown jewels on purple velvet. Having passed through a tumultuous half decade or so, Depeche Mode finally sound like they're finding their comfort zone.
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In retrospect, 2005's Playing the Angel seems to kick off a new phase in the band's career, synthesizing the constituent elements explored across the band's three post-Violator albums into a newly coherent sound, with juiced-up analogue synthesizers congealing around no-nonsense guitars and rock-steady drumming. Gore cedes songwriting on three tracks to Gahan (and two co-writers), whose "Suffer Well," "I Want It All" and "Nothing's Impossible" chart the depths of his blackest years... and the lights that guide him through sobriety. But it's Gore's songs "John the Revelator," "The Sinner in Me" that make the most of the band's perennial themes of sin and redemption.
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Released in 1981, Depeche Mode's debut album didn't invent synth-pop - crucial recordings from Gary Numan, the Human League and the Normal came first - but it certainly helped perfect the form. Blippy, zap-happy synthesizers and drum machines gave the music a cellophane, futurist sheen, while the chugging arpeggios of tracks like "Nodisco" and "Photographic" traced back to Giorgio Moroder's Italo-disco in a high-energy fusion of club sweat and Kraftwerk cool. Recorded... by a trio of Martin Gore, Dave Gahan and short-term member Vince Clarke, one gets the sense that it's really Clarke's album; the shivery, major-key counterpoints of songs like "New Life," "Dreaming of Me" and "Just Can't Get Enough" would go on to become staples of the sound of his later projects Yazoo and Erasure.
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Released the year after Some Great Reward, Catching Up With Depeche Mode is a sort of companion to the US-only People Are People, which aimed to build the band's growing Stateside popularity by introducing listeners to back-catalogue highlights. Reprising four of Some Great Reward's best cuts, the comp surveys six worthy cuts from the band's first three albums, ranging from the peppy electro-pop of "Dreaming of Me," "New Life" and "Just Can't... Get Enough" to the darker, more ambivalent "The Meaning of Love."
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The new songs "Flexible" and "It's Called a Heart," also released as singles around the same time, sound today like curios, though the former is significant as one of the band's first forays into country-fried electro-pop. But things get more interesting with "Shake the Disease," a plaintive pop treatise on illness as romantic metaphor, and "Flies on the Windscreen," a rapturously nihilistic anthem that would serve as one of the keystones of the album Black Celebration, released the following year. -
The final record to feature Alan Wilder, responsible for the lush sonics and striking arrangements of the band's late '80s records, Songs of Faith and Devotion found the band struggling to break new ground after the success of Violator. The beefed-up guitars sound like a sop to their growing modern-rock fanbase, but the arena-sized songs like "I Feel You," "Walking in My Shoes" and "Mercy in You" sound sluggish, bloated and uncertain... of where to turn. Chunky, sample-oriented rhythms show traces of acid house's expanding influence - "Get Right With Me," tinged with breakbeats and ecstatic gospel that wouldn't sound out of place on a Happy Mondays record, is probably as "baggy" as the band ever got.
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![Violator [digital version] album cover](http://images.emusic.com/music/images/album/117/472/11747244/155x155.jpg)
![Music For The Masses [digital version] album cover](http://images.emusic.com/music/images/album/117/471/11747197/155x155.jpg)
