Last night I finished watching the documentary Depeche Mode: The Dark Progression which focuses, after maybe half an hour of set-up and historical context, on the four-album arc of Black Celebration through Songs of Faith and Devotion; about a decade straddling the mid-80s to the mid-90s, and clearly Depeche Mode's zenith in terms of commercial success and influence.
I got this--a little bit by surprise--by Netflix, and I had been simultaneously listening to a bunch of bootleg remixes by a guy named Naweed Wahla (you can hear most of them on youtube.) At the same time a brand new album is due out tomorrow, I think, and they're kicking off a tour to support it (coming to North America in August, and starting with my hometown!) The DVD was actually quite good, even though it was an "unauthorized" one--footage of interviews with producers, biographers, and other artists who toured with them were all included (Gareth Jones, David Bascombe, Jonathan Miller, Andy McClusky, Gary Numan, Thomas Dolby, and a few others.) One thing Gareth Jones mentioned is that he thought the album Some Great Reward was transitional--from his perspective (and it was the middle of three that he produced) it was clearly in between Construction Time Again and Black Celebration in terms of what the band was doing technically with sampling and whatnot. However, it occurs to me that every Depeche Mode album is transitional. Depeche Mode's enduring popularity and importance is, at least partly, based on the fact that they don't retread the same ground over and over again. They vary their approach subtly--enough to keep their fanbase usually--but they vary it nonetheless. They're always evolving.
To be honest with y'all, my favorite DM is about the time that I discovered them; in the late 80s. Although I was familiar with the song "People Are People" and actually liked it a lot, I didn't follow up from that to pay attention to who sang it, or get any more material of theirs. In about 1988 or so, I ended up with a copy of Music for the Masses and I was reading Dracula for the first time at the same time--so while I read, I listened to DM. That right there was a perfect match. I quickly fell in love with the darker sound of Depeche Mode, and as I delved into their back catalog, I liked best the two albums that were closest to Masses in time. Speak And Spell hardly counted; it might as well have been a different band altogether (and in many ways, it was.) A Broken Frame had Martin Gore just barely starting to stretch his wings musically, while still trying to imitate (sometimes) the successful pattern of Vince Clark. Construction Time Again had Gore doing much more of his own thing, but it still felt unrefined and in need of maturation to get to where it needed to be. But with the triad of albums, Some Great Reward, Black Celebration and Music For the Masses, Depeche Mode had fully "flowered" as a dark sounding, musically mature group, with some real artistic chops, who's albums were much more than simply the sum of all the songs on them. To be honest with you, I even got a bit pretentious about their artistic merits myself. A failing to which I'm still not completely immune.
Depeche Mode had, up to that point, been quite productive, but after taking a relatively lengthy break, they came out with their most successful album to date in 1990, right in the middle of my senior year in high school (lead single "Personal Jesus" had been out in the late summer or fall, and "Enjoy the Silence" came out right near the beginning of the year, if I remember correctly.) When the full album came out, I actually didn't like it much. To me, the somewhat hoaky sounding "Pleasure, Little Treasure" had been the direction that the entire album followed. It eventually grew on me--helped no doubt by the fact that "Enjoy the Silence" is probably their best song ever--as well as some really cool b-sides and later remixes--but it took literally years to do so, and I still don't like it as much as I do Masses. The subsequent Songs of Faith and Devotion was more of what I didn't like about Violator--except fused with gospel and grunge and all kinds of other influences that I didn't like even more. Then Alan Wilder left the band, and the era of "classic line-up" Depeche Mode came to an end. The band continued, of course, but greatly diminished, as Alan Wilder's role as the technical innovator and only "true" musician in the band had to be filled by a rotating line-up of producers who lacked the consistency of vision and talent that Alan brought.
Although I don't like Construction Time Again on the front end or Violator and Songs of Faith And Devotion on the back end as much as I do the three albums sandwiched in between them, I do see the six albums that were made with the "classic line-up" of Alan Wilder, Martin Gore, Andrew Fletcher and Dave Gahan as the most iconic and emblematic of Depeche Mode's entire storied career, and I don't think that I'm alone in that view. Because Depeche Mode stands so alone, and casts such a long shadow over everybody else in the entire electronic music biz even today, I didn't have a lot of Depeche Mode on my phone, so I actually hadn't listened to them much recently, and I was keenly feeling the void. Deciding to put the classic line-up CDs in my car and go through them in successsion one after another, lingering as long on one album as I want, I've been feeling the love once again for my first and greatest love in electronic music once again.
Another curious aside; because of Depeche Mode's status, influence and popularity, as well as now long they've been around, and because technology nowadays makes this relatively easy, bootleg remixes on youtube (and elsewhere) are very common. Here's one for one of my favorite songs from Masses, "Behind the Wheel."
In the mid-90s, synthpop was forced deep underground, but the advent of the Internet meant that it could keep itself alive in the ICU for a time; until the internet actually completely fragmented the traditional music distribution channels and opened the market up for all kinds of niche tastes. Nowadays, finding good electronic music of all kinds of varieties--synthpop, futurepop, EBM, electro, and many, many others is something we take for granted, but during much of the 90s, finding stuff on synthpop meant following the e-mail newsletter and discussion list of Todd Durant of A Different Drum. In fact, much of my first introduction to the label bands, and other bands associated with the scene in those days, was from the samplers and collections put out by A Different Drum. The Mix, Rinse and Spin series, which had two entries (the second was a double CD) introduced me to De/Vision, which got a lot of chatter as an "important" player in the scene during the 90s (and beyond, although after the 90s, I didn't feel it was as important to follow the scene, since it was growing too fast to keep up with.) The first volume had a longer remix of "Try to Forget", one of the band's earliest hits (in a relative sense, of course--they released it during the height of the synthpop crash. Too bad; they were already formed; if they'd managed to release it in 1988, when they first wrote it, we could be talking about it in the same breath as Camouflage's "The Great Commandment" as an example of German synthpop that was heavily influenced by Depeche Mode.) The second volume had a number of songs, including three remixes of the song "Hear Me Calling", which remains one of my favorite De/Vision tracks today.
Eventually I got a lot of De/Vision material--most of it, except for many of the remixes, actually--but it took me a while. Not that I didn't like all of those songs, but because I got Zehn, which billed itself as a "greatest hits" kind of CD up through the late 90s. And frankly, if it was the greatest hits, then it scared me to listen to the non-hits. Eventually, I also got Monosex, which was released the same year, and it's excellent. After that, I started collecting De/Vision more carefully--like I said, I eventually ended up with the entire album collection (including Zehn and Remixed, which are obviously compilation albums.) I just picked up their newest album, Rockets & Swords, which prompted me to create mp3 CDs of the entire collection (in order) so I could throw it in the car and listen to their body of work in order. I couldn't fit everything I had on a single CD, and in fact, I couldn't fit it on two CDs without either splitting one of the albums in half, or omitting about half a dozen remixes. I opted for the latter.
In the car this morning on the way in, I finished the first CD, which goes through the Two album, and popped in the second one, which starts off with Remixed. Doing it this way brought to mind the fact that it really took De/Vision a while to get rolling with good material, and it's a big part of the reason Zehn didn't immediately impress me much--it's mostly made up of early material.
Their debut album, World Without End has a total of three good songs (which admittedly, are quite good) and the rest are pretty forgetable. Unversed in Love is even worse--I think none of the tracks on it are as good as the three stand-outs from the prior album (although admittedly some are better than the remainder, at least.) Then De/Vision released Antiquity which was a compilation of sorts of some songs that were hanging around but not put on either of the other two albums, presumably because they weren't even as good as the mediocre, forgettable tracks that made up the bulk of the releases to date. So, it really isn't until the fourth release, Fairyland, that we get a De/Vision release that's genuinely good, with several good tracks, and with non-stand-out tracks that are still respectable. Zehn gives us the three good tracks from the freshman effort (including some great remixes of them as well) and then a smattering of songs from either Fairyland, Unversed in Love, or unreleased tracks that must have been b-sides or something.
Then, finally, we get to Monosex which was the best De/Vision release to date by a long shot. Frankly, I wonder if maybe it isn't still the best De/Vision album, although most of the albums since have also been quite good. The possible exception here is Void, which followed Monosex. I actually think it's not bad, but I remember all kinds of bitter, hyperbolic, and melodramatic responses from the fans who felt betrayed by it, calling it "not even a synthpop album; it's a rock album" as if that were some kind of pejorative (or as if that were some kind of true; neither of which is the case.)
Sadly, for the Remixed CD, producer José Alvarez-Brill, who despite his name is a German, mostly took material from the same period as Zehn. I think what he did with it was better, but I still would have preferred to see remixes of newer material. Some of that has since come out too.
Browsing through their collection on Amazon, you get a weird mix of readily available and then... not. You can find almost everything, but a lot of it is collectible, imported CDs and sells at prohibitively high prices. Other stuff is available for mp3 download. Which seems to be which doesn't always make a lot of sense. There's also a fair bit of collected stuff; you can end up with quite a few repeat tracks if you're a real completist. I've even got a lot, and I'm not a completist.
I would recommend skipping entirely World Without End, Unversed in Love and Antiquity. Almost anything that's any good on those CDs are already on Zehn, plus if you get the CD version of Zehn (instead of the mp3 version) you get awesome remixes of the three freshman songs. If you do like remixes, make sure and get the Limited version of Remixed which comes with a second CD of remixes, some of which are better (or at least as good) as the ones on the first CD. The 2006 Best Of also has a second CD of remixes, many of which are excellent. Many of which, however, are rather older--if you've been hunting down remixes already (as I had, in limited amounts) you may not see much here that you don't already have. De/Vision seem to be learning from George Lucas how to repackage and resell the exact same content all over again.
Their 2010 release Popgefahr, which is really good, had a 2011 Remix release, and it also comes in many varieties. The US Mix, which is readily available as an mp3 download, and you can get everything else as the Popgefahr collection, which sells for a pretty cheap price, considering that it's four CDs. Between the two, you can get no less that six versions of the Popgefahr album for a price that's about the same as two reasonably priced import CDs. Not at all a bad deal, and the remixes are--surprisingly--mostly pretty consistently good (of course there are a few exceptions. Aren't there always?)
But that's remixes: after Fairyland in regular, non-compilation, non-remix releases, I think most of the rest of the following albums are worth picking up with the possible exception of Void, which may not quite be to everyone's taste. The accusations of it not even being synthpop are absurd, but it is true that it has a somewhat different sound than, say, Two, or Devolution, or n00b or whatever. Subkutan also seems to me to be a little bit of a mis-step; it's not actively bad, but it just doesn't seem to stand out much either. But listening to all of their music back to back like I did also made another point fairly clear; there's a fair bit of filler with De/Vision too. If I really wanted to, I could cut out at least 2/3s of their body of work and not really miss it too much--in fact, sticking with just the more standout tracks, from their long, long collection, you still end up with a massive collection of great songs that only a handful of other electronic artists could match (Depeche Mode? Maybe Erasure, VNV Nation, Assemblage 23 and a few others too?)
Anyway, like I said, I'm not exactly a completist, but one particular remix sent me on a merry wild-goose chase for a long time, the EnTrusted to Mesh mix of "Hear Me Calling." That was supposed to be a third single release from Monosex (after "We Fly... Tonight" and "Strange Affection") but for some reason it was commuted to just being a promo-release. The Compilation by A Different Drum Mix, Rinse and Spin vol. 2 actually included every remix from the single except the EnTrusted to Mesh.
In any case, a quick search of Youtube turned up at least three uploads of the song, so here it is, for your enjoyment.
I don't normally talk a lot about industrial music, with the exception of some of the fairly accessible and "poppish" groups, like Front 242--and their futurepop spawn; Apoptygma Berzerk, VNV Nation, Assemblage 23, Covenant, Neuroticfish, etc. But for a little while there, I boldly ventured into some industrial territory. One of my earliest conquests in this territory was a Cleopatra Records compilation called Industrial Revolution (retroactively called 1st edition, because it was later re-compiled and re-released with some of the same songs... but not all of them.) I ended up buying most of what I really liked from this album on its own--some early Sister Machine Gun, KMFDM, etc. And then I ditched the double-CD because, frankly, much of it was too dissonant and weird for my taste.
But one of the more dissonant and weird songs is one that for some reason I always kinda liked. Australia's Foetus (also known as Foetus on Your Breath, Foetus Under the Wheels and various other phrases using the word Foetus, all of them potentially kinda offensive) contributed the track "Butterfly Potion" to the compilation. Frankly, I've been a little frightened about looking up more Foetus material... but at the same time, I do like this song. This, then, is Industrial Music, when it's raw, ugly, dissonant, disharmonic, and noisy... and yet somehow, strangely compelling nonetheless.
Prior to their break-out success with 1981's Dare, the Human League labored in obscurity in a style that's quite different from their more commercial offerings like "Don't You Want Me." In fact, early Human League was much colder, and overtly Kraftwerkian in sound, and old Usenet synthpop guru Al Crawford used to compare them pointedly to Gary Numan and John Foxx.
Although Dare was where synthpop focusing on the pop (as opposed to Gary Numan's somewhat novelty-sounding hits earlier) became mainstream huge, in many ways, the earlier Human League is now seen as quite classic, innovative and influential. The most recognized track from that period is the only single release from their first album. It was actually first released in 1979 but failed to chart. On a re-release in 1980, it managed to scrape up to number 62 in the UK.
I've had this track for many years, and think it's quite intriguing in many ways, but honestly I'd also kinda forgotten about it until my recent, belated discovery of Marsheaux. The Greek girls covered a lot of 80s material, and "Empire State Human" is one of them, which reminded me again of another "classic" synthpop group of the 80s who hadn't quite managed to make it on my blog yet. I imagine that later I'll add more of their Dare or post-Dare material, but for now, here's kind of the "original" Human League song, "Empire State Human."
Given that I'm a big fan of the modern crop of "girl synthpop" bands--folks like Parralox, the Ultrasonics, Emmon, and for that matter, even folks like Little Boots, La Rouge, duets with female vocalists by Martin Solveig or David Guetta, or much of the output of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, you'd think that I would have embraced Marsheaux much earlier. I'd been vaguely aware of them, as they remixed my favorite Ultrasonics song ("Perfect Girl") as well as one of my favorite Mesh songs ("Crash") but I'd somehow not really investigated them per se. For some reason, I recently did so, and now I find that I've been missing some great stuff.
I think Marsheaux's best work is there original songs, but curiously, they've covered an awful lot of 80s songs, by artists as diverse as Depeche Mode, OMD, The Lightning Seeds, New Order, The Human League, When in Rome and even Billy Idol.
For today, I'm going to link to their cover of Depeche Mode's "New Life"--it's pretty representative of their style in general. Andy McClusky (of OMD fame) said that they have a "certain sort of wispy, melancholic charm." In fact, as I listen to a lot of Marsheaux, I can't help but think that that's the direction I would have loved to see Book of Love mature into--but which they didn't, sadly. But there are clear and obvious similarities.
Of course, they're not quite as clear in the cover songs, one of which I'm linking to today, but hopefully it's good enough to inspire you to seek out some of their other material.
Cosmicity is one of the early synthpop "bands" of the post-crash, internet driven phase of the genre, having been around since sometime in the early 90s at least (the first CD, The Vision has an original 1994 release date, and there's apparently unreleased material out there older than that.) Cosmicity also isn't really a "band" since it's pretty much just one guy, Mark Nicholas.
Cosmicity was also one of the earliest signees to the A Different Drum label, and makes a number of appearances on early compilations and whatnot released by Todd. This, of course, meant that they have one of the longest pedigrees of post-popular synthpop out there, and that I've been following them almost that long--since the late 1990s, at least. I've got almost all of the Cosmicity catalog; I picked up Isabella on CD early on, and the re-released double CD of The Vision and The Moment. Later, when I first had an emusic account, I got The Binary Language of Love, Pure, Renaissance and Escape Pod for Two, as well as a bunch of remixes and whatnot. More recently, I bought Resynthesized and Ascii Cupcake as well as a couple more remixes as Amazon.com mp3 downloads. Perhaps fittingly, most of my Cosmicity collection has been picked up as digital downloads. I recently converted everything I could to mp3, attempting to make a CD-R of mp3s that had the entire collection. However... it wouldn't all fit. I managed to leave The Vision and The Moment off, and then only had to cut a single song or two from the rest of the collection, so I did that, and over the last week or so, I listened to the entire Cosmicity catalog (almost) in chronological order. Then, I started it over again (my car is queued up near the beginning of The Moment again as we speak. Since I couldn't fit them on the CD-R, I just brought them along in old-fashioned CD format.)
I don't have Syn or Forgive Me My Syns, nor do I have the two CDs or so released under the Mark Nicholas (instead of Cosmicity) name--presumably because they were different in style. In fact, I had thought he had abandoned the Cosmicity name completely, but recently I just discovered the existance of Ascii Cupcake which was released in 2010; an EP of Cosmicity material. His output did slow considerably in the last decade, though--although his marriage, becoming a father, and dabbling under a different "brand name" in a different style of music makes it seem much slower than it really is.
An important part of the Cosmicity experience, shown a little in the video below, is the cult of personality that Mark has developed around himself. All of his songs are quite personal; most even autobiographical, at least somewhat. And if you read his liner notes, comments on his webpage, and elsewhere, one gets the impression that Mark is really "out there" socially--really sharing almost to the point of TMI. He even comes across as kinda primadonna or diva-like; but somehow instead of that coming across as unmanly and annoying, he manages to make it somewhat self-deprecating and even charming. The only exception to this is that there's a fairly strong undercurrent of whininess and petulance about the reaction from fans, his label, and others to Syn and what it represented; both a stylistic departure from the Cosmicity norm, as well as an attempt to be dark, edgy, and cuss a lot. This apparently didn't go over well, and the musical style has never appealed to me either (I heard some samples of Syn earlier on an earlier iteration of his website (I believe) and The Moment also previews a lot of the sound and approach on some of its material.) Luckily, he's mostly left that side alone, or at least walled it off away from the Cosmicity name and released it under his own name and as a different brand.
My own interactions, scant as they have been, with Mark, have always been quite pleasant, though. I sent him a couple of emails when a couple of the tracks from my emusic download of Escape Pod For Two were messed up, but I had cancelled my account with emusic and moved on after getting them (and before they could charge my credit card for another month of membership.) Although he chided my somewhat for not going to emusic with the problem, he did, in fact, help a brutha out.
Speaking broadly, I'd say my favorite Cosmicity projects are Isabella and Escape Pod For Two. Getting the two-disc version of Escape Pod is especially desireable, as it features a number of remixes that are really, really good--including the Syrian remix of "Sedgewick", the Raindancer remix of "Departure" and the T.O.Y. remix of "Tinnitus." Isabella also has some excellent tracks, and some of the remixes are top notch. Some of them are a bit harder to find, though--the Bongo Club version of "Visionary" and the Red Sweater mix of "Your Beautiful Lie" are hard to find now--although the Extended and David's Groove 100 Mix respectively of each is on Resynthesized.
Pure and Renaissance are a tier slightly lower than those two, full of really good songs and including some of my favorite songs. Pure also has singles/remixes readily available through Amazon; the DJ Ram remix of "Defeat" is especially recommended.
The Vision and The Moment are considered by Mark himself (it appears) as somewhat crude, unexperienced and primitive, but actually there's a lot of good material on both, especially if you get the 2-disc re-release that has a number of extra tracks and remixes on it. The Binary Language of Love for whatever reason I could take or leave; it's not actively bad by any means, but none of the material on it really speaks to me. And Ascii Cupcake is probably too early for me to have any comment on yet--I've only listened to the whole thing through two or three times so far. So far, though, I think it's really good.
Another curious aside; the Resynthesized remix double CD is a great bargain, even if much of the first half of it is Binary Language material. Curiously, on Amazon at least, the tracks are kinda messed up. The first one of the disc-2 material is just a bunch of snaps and crackles, while the second song is actually the first song mislabeled. In fact, the entire second disc worth of songs is mislabeled and "off" by one. The good news is that this means you actually have almost all of the tracks, even if you need to go and relabel the tags and filenames. The bad news is that you're missing one--the Secret Mix of "Awake." For now, at least, however, you can buy it as an actual CD for only $3 from A Different Drum. While it's not advertised as such, that's probably a "while supplies last" kind of offer, so get it while you can. Certainly it's the best way to pick it up. Although iTunes and CDbaby might not have the same issue that Amazon does; I can't tell from any personal experience.
Lately I've been reviewing some of my more "obscure" 80s CDs, and by "obscure" I mean merely that they don't belong to one of the early New Wave "supergroups" that put out tons of tracks during the decade and became emblematic of some of the early synthpop sound. This mostly only excludes Depeche Mode, Erasure, New Order, OMD and the Pet Shop Boys (although I've been listening to some of their stuff too.) Most of these bands were relatively short-lived, putting out only a few CDs in total--or even only one. Some of them had some modest success, charting in the US on the Dance charts with a track or two, if not the pop charts. Most of them also came along near the end of the era. So, I just finished up with Seven Red Seven, and I'll probably also do a brief revisit of Cause & Effect and Camouflage too, but I'm inevitably led to Red Flag when I get in this mood.
I discovered, while on a retrospective of this blog, that my earlier Red Flag post probably needs to be edited since the video that I embedded has been taken down due to the user's account being terminated. But I also want to post some other Red Flag material, including the first of their songs to catch my ear, "Russian Radio."
While Red Flag is always insistent that their name comes from a surfer warner symbol (they lived for some time in the San Diego area) their iconography, and the fact that one of their first successful songs was, in fact, called "Russian Radio", and the fact that the Cold War was still a fact of life in 1988, it makes that claim just a little bit hard to believe, and I admit that I'm skeptical that they didn't in fact milk the late-era Soviet iconography for attention in both their name, their song titles, and their image in general.
Anyway, without further ado, "Russian Radio." This is a long version from their 12", which I won as a door prize at a dance once in 1988 or 1989.
