Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Depeche Mode
Label: Columbia Records
Release: 2017
Runtime: 49:59
Rating: 4/5
If ever there was a time, it’s now! Now is exactly the right moment for precisely the kind of album Depeche Mode have put out with »Spirit«. You could say that »Spirit« is the first album by a world-famous, commercially successful band, the kind that fills stadiums with ease, to openly settle accounts with the current delusions of this brave new world. I’m thinking especially of the revolt of many internationally renowned acts (leaving aside U2’s sly, self-serving opportunism), who reacted sharply and without mincing words to the Republicans’ march in America and their seizure of the presidential throne in the USA. So Depeche Mode pour their feelings about recent events in the world unstoppably onto »Spirit«.
Depeche Mode started their musical career as rebels, and with that rebelliousness they unwittingly sparked a real little revolution in rock’n’roll’s development toward digital synthesized sounds, all the way to the finest electronic varieties. synth art-pop aesthetics And if, after many years of successful, perpetual sonic and stylistic evolution, the previous album »Delta Machine« conceptually failed to win us over with convincing musical solutions, and Depeche Mode sounded aged, spent and worn out on it, then its successor »Spirit« is exactly what the band was already looking for with its predecessor. From the opening bars of Going Backwards, it’s instantly clear that listening to the new Depeche Mode album is going to be a seriously interesting mouthful and a singular challenge. What was missing on »Delta Machine« is what »Spriit« brings. And that’s the rebellious rage. Unbelievable, but it’s not hard to pick up. And that from mature, well-established gentlemen who are all about to hit sixty.
That Depeche Mode have, with age, turned into true masters of electronic gloom, of a depressively weighed-down atmosphere that, in the hands of visionary creative fine-tuning, is unique on the planet, is no longer news. Likewise, their image as commercial hit-makers is markedly different from what it was in the golden eighties and much of the nineties. The last truly infectious hit we logged was Precious, off »Playing the Angel«, which is now twelve years old. After all, that’s when Depeche Mode first visited Slovenia, and with »Spirit« they’ll be coming back a second time, on May 14, 2017! Depeche Mode understand the word hit quite differently today than they did ten or more years ago. They no longer chase hits at any cost. Art is therefore the main expressive focus and driving engine of a mature band.
Already with the first track, Going Backwards, which actually recalls the aforementioned Precious, except that the lead phrase has an inverted musicality, and so the song opens the album in a distinctly gloomy way, Depeche Mode disappointedly note the retrogression of the “progress” of modern Western European civilization and the absurdities the little guy faces today just to survive in the modern capitalist order. In Where’s The Revolution, which with its musical catchiness and the danceably charming swing of its tight rhythm grips hardest of all the tracks on the new album, they settle accounts with equal disappointment with the comfort in which the grayness of mass groupthink has gotten stuck, which in fact helped drive society to its fall and betrayed the band’s hopes (»C’mmon people, you let me down« belts out Gahan). The album ends in exactly the same way, with Gore’s phenomenal The Fall, where the main author and composer of the new Depeche Mode album doesn’t forget, with his vocal delivery, to take a jab with the remark: »We’re fucked« (We’re fucked!«). The closer, which compositionally is one of the most interesting and dynamic, is thus far from packed with optimism. Quite the opposite.
And this depressive atmosphere, which »Spirit« is full of this time, works phenomenally in harmony with the weight of its powerful poetic message. Once again Depeche Mode face the artist’s soul trapped in the shackles of cruel reality, the resulting yielding to temptation (in search of self-salvation), and personal brokenness; of course, erotica (You Move) and religious questions are back too (Cover Me, with a middle section that evokes the retro sound of moments from the album »Violator«). However, the basic message of the new album is a critique of the current delusions of the brave new world. Where is the limit to the absurdities we’re witnessing? How far and how deep will we stoop for the sake of a select few? The Worst Crime and the anti-war Scum develop along these lines too. In the latter, Gahan’s vocal is especially uncompromising in settling accounts with politicians, corporations and the scheming of a handful of “invisible” power players (one of whom recently, finally, got tired of transplanting hearts and swapping blood).
The track Poison Heart carries some of the “Songs Of Faith and Deviotion” mimicry. That is, a slowed-down rhythm, a restrained, mildly bashful grandeur that grows from circle to circle, both sonically and atmospherically, and that evokes the possibility of bringing in a choral gospel. So Much Love sounds truly old-school. The programmed loop it uses evokes the sound of the eighties, the guitar phrase even flirts in passing with the hit Never Let Me Down, and the uniformly minimalist sound itself knocks on the door of the »Neue Deutsche Welle« modernist era, which was derived from “krautrock”. While we’re at it, it’s quite interesting how Poorman (with a very deftly woven-in guitar motif), through its chosen lead synth sound, evokes something that could have come off the album »Construction Time Again«, especially what you can hear in the track Pipeline. This kind of flirting with the sound of the eighties is surprisingly kept up later by No More as well, while the excellent The Fall, which closes the album, is actually a brilliant cross between the band’s new and old musical worlds and as such one of the album’s creative, atmospheric peaks.
»Spirit« feels as though Depeche Mode have walked a whole developmental circle with it. It’s a markedly different album from »Delta Machine« and doesn’t come across as an excuse for yet another megalomaniac tour of naked cash-grabbing. As far as substance goes, this is once again a fully tangible Depeche Mode album, one that will touch you deeply with its penetrating depth of undisguised feeling, passion and all the expressive charisma its creators display, and move you with its directness.
Message and sonic evolution have found an exceptionally balanced shared dialogue, and so »Spirit« works as a whole that is extremely cohesive, conceptually credible and expressively convincing. It fixes the bitter aftertaste of its predecessor’s dryness and confirms that the band still has plenty of creative charge. As for the remark about the closed developmental circle of the band’s path, »Spirit« flirts with the past (the occasional nostalgic retro sound pulling the eighties to the surface) along with plenty of mature artistic statement, which is of course what we expect from Depeche Mode in new times. Plus the familiar sonic compactness, in which Gore’s guitar ornaments must not be missing . The album has, in balanced doses, moments of fragility and tenderness, especially in its second half, while in the opening stretch of the first two tracks it opens up sharply serrated. In line with the critical messages.
As said. »Spirit« is an excellent album that Depeche Mode simply made at the time when it was needed most. Not just by the band members, but by all their fans too. It’s an excellent reflection of truthfulness and artistic integrity, which guarantees the band’s originality and with which Depeche Mode once again surprised us in a very positive way. Especially because they’re in the late, mature era of their career, when most of their peers have long since gone creatively flat and burnt out.
Depeche Mode – Where’s the Revolution (official video):
Line-up
Dave Gahan – vocals
Martin Gore – guitar, keyboards, synthesizers, backing vocals, lead vocals on tracks 7 and 12
Andy Fletcher – keyboards, synthesizers, backing vocals
Production
James Ford
Track list
1. Going Backwards
2. Where’s the Revolution
3. The Worst Crime
4. Scum
5. You Move
6. Cover Me
7. Eternal
8. Poison Heart
9. So Much Love
10. Poorman
11. No More (This is the Last Time)
12. The Fall
