Depeche Mode's "Golden Age"

I've often assumed and been told that the formative years of your musical taste sticks with you. I crystalized my musical tastes in the mid to late 80s, at least with regards to pop music, and therefore the "Golden Years" to me of Depeche Mode were always the three albums that had a more or less consistent sound (more or less) and tone from that era. Violator, their first big hit (in 1990) didn't sound right, because it was 1) too short, and didn't have enough good tracks, 2) too hoaky and dirty, with a lot of fuzz and big hoaky steel guitar sounds, 3) just wasn't as polished, and certainly wasn't even the same sound or feel at all—on purpose. Songs of Faith and Devotion was an even further departure, and the Depeche Mode that made slick, stylish electronic pop music with a dark edge was replaced by this weird bluesy pseudo-industrial rock band that had only a vague resemblance, honestly, to Depeche Mode that came before. It was very much a product of its time rather than something that comes across as more timeless. Although, to be fair, maybe the mid-to late 80s timelessness is an artifact of the fact that that's when my musical tastes crystalized, and they crystalized around that sound, so I'll always like it and feel that it sounds good. It's hard to say; 80s pop culture is going through a bit of a renaissance lately with the kids, but that may be more a fad rather than a recognition that 80s music is really timeless. Especially Second British Invasion New Wave 80s Music, which is really my favorite 80s music. 

In any case, my ranking of Depeche Mode albums, based on purely personal subjective criteria for the most part has always been as follows—mostly always, I should say. I added Memento Mori a couple of years ago, and finally decided between Music for the Masses and Black Celebration, which both had valid claims of being the best of their repertoire. 

1. Music for the Masses
2. Black Celebration
3. Some Great Reward
4. Violator
5. Construction Time Again
6. A Broken Frame
7. Speak & Spell
8. Memento Mori
9. Playing the Angel
10. Ultra
11. Songs of Faith & Devotion
12. Sounds of the Universe
13. Delta Machine
14. Exciter
15. Spirit

I ended up going with Music over Black Celebration because it was produced almost entirely by Depeche Mode themselves. Dave Bascombe was the credited producer, but even he claims that his involvement was more like an engineer than a traditional producer, and that Alan Wilder really was the director of the sound of the band there. Black Celebration was the last that Daniel Miller still forcibly contributed to the sound, and the last of three that Gareth Jones was involved with. Ergo, Music is the most "pure" Depeche Mode of the Depeche Mode albums, especially of that trio of my top three albums from the "Golden Age", which I think is sufficient to get it the top spot over Black Celebration. 

I should point out that Violator is still a great album, in spite of my disappointment with it. "Personal Jesus" and "Policy of Truty" are good singles, "Halo", "Waiting for the Night" and "Blue Dress" are great album tracks, and "Enjoy the Silence" is possibly the best single Depeche Mode song of them all. "Dangerous" and "Sea of Sin" from the Violator era b-sides are also pretty great tracks, and equal to many of the album tracks. Getting shunted off to b-side was a bit ignominious for those two in particular. Instrumental b-sides like "Memphisto", "Sibeling" and "Kaleid" on the other hand, feel like that's an appropriate place for them, but they're really good.

Songs of Faith and Devotion, on the other hand, belongs to the bottom third of albums, and most of the rest that follow it feel like they're retreating that sound, only not as good. Don't get me wrong; there are good tracks from albums in the bottom third; "Wrong" in particular comes across as a top tier DM song, no matter what era it was released in, for instance, but Playing the Angel and Memento Mori are the only post-Songs albums that surpass it, which is sad, because those are part of the amorphous middle third of albums that are mostly quite different from each other, and which often shift positions in my esteem, because they're honestly all a bunch of albums that I like (or don't) equally to each other, albeit for different reasons, given how different they are to each other. 

This isn't to say that there aren't a lot of kind of cheesy moments in the top three albums of my Golden Age, of course. "Master and Servant" and "Blasphemous Rumours" feel like they're trying too hard to be transgressive, subversive and edgy, and therefore come across as immature and sophomoric rather than profound or meaningful, although as a teenager I was myself too immature and sophomoric to recognize that. I never liked "Dressed in Black" at all, and "New Dress" also comes across as pretty shallow. The band themselves never thought it appropriate to have "But Not Tonight" as part of the Black Celebration album, but being in the North American region, I never had a version of the album that lacked it; even the vinyl version included it. (Not that I had vinyl. I had the cassette tape and then replaced that with the CD, which I still have.) "I Want You Now" is the only album track on Masses that I didn't like, but at the time, I just noted that every Depeche Mode album had at least one track I didn't like, and it was usually a weird Martin Gore-sung ballad. Honestly, even with the tracks that I don't like, those three end up being good "listen through" albums where I can play the entire album beginning to end and enjoy it like a pop music symphony of sorts. Although I'm less pretentious about it than I used to be when I was more young and arrogant and said that I thought Depeche Mode albums were as good as a classic music symphony in terms of artistic and musical merit. 

But that isn't to say that they don't have real artistic merit, however. I do find that more recently, instrumental, orchestral music is more what I'm in the mood to listen to. Not necessarily always "classical", although Classical certainly has more artistic merit than, say, music or video game soundtracks, or the unofficial soundtracks on YouTube that I listen to like Graham Plowman's Lovecraft unofficial soundtracks. 

Erasure

I've been content to occasionally talk about music on my "main" blog rather than using this blog for anything at all. I really shouldn't though. I was gearing up to make another post about Erasure, when I decided on a whim that I should do what I always meant to and talk about it here. Yay! I may get back to migrating music posts to this blog, although I doubt I'll be using it like I originally did, where I just highlight a specific song. That paradigm has been done for years and I can't believe it will come back. I'm just not interested in doing that anymore.

In any case, I haven't listened to Erasure much in a long time, but I threw my entire collection (from my phone, not my CDs, so it's not completely everything I own) on my queue and have been listening to it again lately. My history with Erasure is a bit complicated; I got turned on to them in about 1988 or so when "Chains of Love" and "A Little Respect" were on the radio. I got The Innocents fairly quickly, and within a year or so I also picked up Wonderland and The Circus. The latter two were among my early CDs when I made the jump from cassette tapes to CDs; The Innocents had to cassette for many years before buying a CD version of it finally. I was around as a fan to by Wild! when it was new, but for whatever reason I bought that on cassette first too (subsequently on CD) probably because I could listen to it in my Walkman without having to record it onto a blank tape first... which was a thing that I had to do with my CDs to play them outside of the house. We had no CD player in any of our cars for many years, and Discmans weren't a thing yet. And I was always a late adopter of new technology anyway. I don't think I had a discman until the mid-90s, and I can't remember how long it was before I had a car with a CD player in it. (Ironically, those are hard to find without an aftermarket stereo nowadays. Everyone just does their music on their phones now.)

At some point in the early 90s, some friends of mine and I who had similar tastes in music determined that Erasure "infamously" had really great albums every even album, while every odd numbered album was more disappointing and somewhat mediocre. Wonderland was wonderful, The Innocents was great, Chorus was pretty brilliant. Meanwhile, The Circus, Wild! and later I Say I Say I Say were all kind of disappointing. This pattern was broken by the eponymous album in 1995, which was even more disappointing than the previous I Say I Say I Say had been. Due in part to what was going on in my own life in the mid-90s, as well as what was going on in pop music and pop culture generally, I kind of lost the plot with Erasure after that. I didn't buy Cowboy or Loveboat or otherwise pay attention to what they were doing for quite some time, and only grabbed them much later. And I still don't know them very well. The 80s and the earliest 90s were my Erasure golden age. The same is true, of course, for other bands that were "big time" in the later 80s of a similar proto-synthpop style, although I didn't even know that label yet, and just called them synthesizer New Wave, or whatever we called them where I lived. I lost the plot in a similar degree with Depeche Mode, with the Pet Shop Boys, and even with relatively minor players like Cause and Effect , Camouflage or Red Flag. Although ironically, just a few years later I started getting pretty involved with bands like De/Vision or Mesh, because they were mining the same veins that those earlier bands had been mining when I was a bigger fan, and which they themselves had kinda sorta turned away from and weren't mining anymore quite as much. As the 90s evolved, and the pop music discontinuity associated with grunge became more pronounced, the prominence of that kind of synthpop sound became more and more edgy and out of the mainstream again. Which is part of what I always liked about them in the first place, to be honest with you, at least in the American market. This meant that some of the OG's were sounding tired rather than fresh, and I got more into newer bands. In the darker vein, De/Vision and Mesh and the new futurepop sound were where I went, and in the lighter side, bands like Cosmicity and others got my attention, as the 90s ended and the 00s started. Newer sounding stuff like Neuroactive or B! Machine were more interesting to me than Erasure or Pet Shop Boys. 

This probably isn't really very fair, though. Erasure were still doing good stuff. Even "mediocre" albums like Erasure or I Say I Say I Say had good tracks. "Fingers & Thumbs (Cold Summer's Day)", at least in the single mix without the weird "ambient bridge" that the album version had is a top tier song. Maybe not as classic as "Oh L'amour" or "A Little Respect" but easily as good as "Stop!" or "Chorus" or something like that. I've made similar complaints about Depeche Mode "losing their way" through the 90s, but I haven't really talked as much about Erasure or Pet Shop Boys (or others) losing their way. In a way, they didn't lose their way as dramatically, they just kept doing the same thing that they were doing, just a little more tired sounding, and it got less and less fresh and interesting over time. "Being Boring" by Pet Shop Boys from the 1990 Behaviour album was kind of a foreshadowing anthem of what I would think of my favorite bands in the late 80s when we were in the mid to late 90s. Not that that's what the song is about, I'm just riffing on the title. 

Anyway, "Fingers & Thumbs" was especially on my mind, because I was surprised to discover that I was missing the mp3 ripped from my CD on my phone and had to go re-rip it and re-add it to my phone. It's also a great example of what I'm talking about; a good song from an era where I was otherwise kind of tired and relatively uninterested in Erasure. Even now that I've added more backcatalog from the period that I missed in the later 90s and 00s and 10s, I'd still say that my interest in even the better tracks is not that great. There's too much going on in the music world now, and both me and the world have moved on from the late 80s Erasure sound. It's a weird catch-22 for these kinds of bands. If they evolve too much, they don't sound like what found them their fans in the first place, so the fans are disappointed. If they don't evolve enough, they sound like a tired retread of what they've already done, and the fans slowly wander off anyway. I suppose it's just the nature of pop music that that's going to happen.