Artist: Depeche Mode
Label: Mute Records
Release: 2009
Length: 9:06
Rating: 4/5
On April 6, 2009, Depeche Mode released the first single from their new studio album “Sounds Of The Universe” (RockLine review HERE), titled “Wrong”. At its core, Wrong is an extension of the energy of the album “Playing The Angel” (2005). For most of the past decade Depeche Mode have been all about creating dark atmospheres, often skirting the very edge of depression, and Wrong doesn’t dodge that either. The fun part of the track comes mainly from its witty lyrics, a highly intelligent, straight-line stacking of verses in a “cause – effect” mold that gives the song the dynamic, mood-swinging ebb and flow it needs. The word Wrong itself is used in the chorus as a dictate in that typical authoritative stance, the kind that makes you feel guilty while listening, as if you’d made a mistake, committed a sin. It’s built from many vocal lines that come across as aggressive, though the lead among them is of course Gahan’s basic, lower-pitched baritone, which only reinforces that uneasy feeling of your own psyche. The song itself kicks off with these dictates of Wrong. In the intro, this trick brings an extremely gloomy feeling, but once the song gets going, it’s largely offset by Gahan’s entertaining sermon of the pre-chorus verses.
Wrong is a mid-tempo track delivering the familiar, highly intelligent code of crafting tasteful synthetic electronic patterns of the new “Playing The Angel” era, which guarantees that proper Depeche Mode oomph. It instantly wins the listener’s sympathy. The track has a top-quality construction, a product of Martin Gore’s brilliant mind, a well-tested, crafty lure that, with its compact flow, meets the high standards always demanded of a band of Depeche Mode’s caliber.
The second track on this single is called Oh Well (Black Light Odyssey Remix). It’s a repetitive electronic loop, underpinned by programmed stomping of a synthetic beat, which is brought to life only by Gahan’s singing. In its bare and downright bizarre stance of self-repetition, the track is made for spinning in nightclubs, for all you weirdos who go to “get your flash on” at VPK in Ljubljana on Fridays, for example. That lets the “Wrong” single venture out among fans of dance techno rhythms, who, at least in Depeche Mode’s case, are almost bound to bite at that kind of bait.
So this isn’t a direct evergreen hit of the Enjoy The Silence type. This time Depeche Mode are far more thrashing, gloomy, dark,… Less commercially minded. Of course, that again depends on where the band is in its evolution. In Depeche Mode’s case, they long ago entered the period of their own artistic maturity. You know how it goes. When something goes wrong (“wrong”), things always break, smash, get lost, people yell, scream, shoot into the void and burn off excess, pointless energy. And with the track Wrong, Depeche Mode have caught exactly that kind of schizophrenic moment, while also serving up a great new song that stirs up the necessary interest in the album “Sounds Of The Universe”.
Line-up
Dave Gahan – vocals
Martin L. Gore – keyboards
Andy Fletcher – keyboards
Production
Ben Hillier
Track list
1. Wrong (03:13)
2. Oh Well (Black Light Odyssey Remix) (05:53)
