They don’t leave marks they leave craters. In retrospect it seems like so much childish bullshit - and it was - but young emotions are runaway meteors. As we drove around in her parents’ Volvo, she told me that what amounted to a weekend fling (and a chaste one at that) wasn’t going to lead to anything more. I spent the ensuing weeks thinking about her angular but beautiful nose, the peculiar cadence of her voice. We met at the beach that fall and made out and danced and listened to Dead Or Alive. Me, I was 16, and I went to visit a girl who lived in another state, expecting that I’d leave with a new girlfriend. Most fans can remember the first time they heard Depeche Mode. Depeche Mode’s ability to provoke disparate reactions in a range of listeners is a rare achievement for a band that achieved enormous commercial success. Their work often feels like an endurance test: How much pain can you take?ĭepeche Mode was always catchy but they were never easy their material touched on suicide, regret, obsession, doubt, and faith. They did so by forcing their listeners on a journey inward to the parts of ourselves that are the most confusing and frightening, the places we need to go to discover what makes us human.
Mindless music was a byproduct of the boundless consumption that defined the times.ĭepeche Mode proved that music often derided as simple synth pop was capable of the same expression as the most sophisticated rock and even classical music. The best music is, of course, meant to do this, but when Depeche Mode started their career in the early ’80s, pop music was as expendable as it was in the 1950s: a product meant for easy use and disposal. The songwriting is similarly formulaic, with each song based on a compilation of elementary electronic riffs, though Depeche Mode is getting more ambitious - the synthetic choral chant from "It Doesn't Matter" is baldly borrowed from the Philip Glass canon.ĭEPECHE MODE - "Black Celebration" (Sire 25429) appearing Saturday at Merriweather Post Pavilion.The singular genius of Depeche Mode’s music might be the way their songs inspire a gut-wrenching personal response.
Singer/songwriter Martin Gore's listless, limited vocals sound as if he's delivering them through a vacuum cleaner, snapping on different attachments for each number. Many of the production gimmicks on "Black Celebration" are arresting, but the group has simply put more polish on the basic formula. Over the space of five albums, Depeche Mode has refined its distinctive sound, marked by a hammering dance beat and trademark musique concre'te blend of "industrial" metallic noises and odd sampled sounds - breathing, slamming doors, flushing toilets.
) would seem likely to reinforce suicidal tendencies, but taken as a whole, this album is so unremittingly morose it becomes almost comical. Songs like "Black Celebration" and "Fly on the Windshield" (sample lyrics: "Death is everywhere / There are flies on the windscreen for a start / Reminding us we could be torn apart / Tonight. MICROCHIP music for moody moderns: "Black Celebration" is another batch of dire and doomy electrodirges from Depeche Mode, pop pap apparently aimed at a burgeoning market of budding adolescent existentialists.
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