The best bits on Depeche Mode's 2013 album Delta Machine were the intros. Once the songs got underway, the band mostly just went through the motions, dutifully recreating the same arena-ready hooks and overblown saints-and-sinners metaphors they've been dealing in for decades. But for a few sweet seconds before the bombast began, there was just the zap and gurgle of Martin Gore's synthesizers.
For anyone who heard the distant promise of a far different, more interesting record in those moments, you're in luck: Gore's new solo album is an all-synthesizer affair. No guitars, no drums, no blues riffs, and, most important of all, no vocals—which means no tangled religious conceits, no BDSM analogies, no rhyming "soul" with "control." Gore has done solo records before—1989's Counterfeit EP and 2003's Counterfeit 2, both collections of synth-pop covers of songs by Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Vini Reilly, et al—and he's done instrumental electronic music in his duo VCMG, with his onetime bandmate Vince Clarke, later of Yazoo and nowErasure. But MG is something new. These are sketches rather than songs, and, unlike VCMG's visceral, sternum-punching, 10,000-watt techno throb, they're designed mostly to fade into the background.
Some tracks feature subtle beats, but for the most part this is ambient music the way Brian Eno envisioned it, as a kind of sonic wallpaper. That's no slight: the record's low stakes help make evident what it excels at, which is sound design—a careful sculpting of electricity and air. It feels less like fine art than exceptional craftsmanship, but that's OK; the world needs beautifully thrown pots as much as it needs Picassos.
A few tracks here began life as demos for Delta Machine; Gore finished MG in 2013, after the band finished touring. He recorded it in his home studio on, principally, a modular synthesizer system. Modular systems are something like the Legos of electronic music: Users build their own, custom synthesizers by patching together various devices into mazelike configurations, the functionality of which is often pretty fuzzy even to the person cabling them together. That unpredictability is important: it means that the process of wiring things together is largely inseparable from the process of composition. It is experimental in the most basic sense—Let's see what happens when we plug this into this—and that sense of curiosity is at the heart of MG. It sounds pretty much like what it is—someone alone in the studio at night, twisting knobs, feeling his way gingerly along the signal chain. In both its restraint and its moodiness, it turns inward, not outward. To listen to it feels a little like eavesdropping on someone else's thoughts.
Gore has described the album as "kind of atmospheric and filmic," and he's right; it would be easy to imagine almost anything here working as a soundtrack cue. The average track length is around three minutes, just long enough for an idea to blossom and shrivel, like a flower in time-lapse. The gnarled arpeggios and general menace of tracks like "Spiral" and "Stealth" recall Nine Inch Nails' Hesitation Marks, while elsewhere the album suggests a grittier, more minimalist answer to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' soundtrack to The Social Network. And it's impossible not to think of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis in the context of the album's most dramatic tracks. "Crowly", with its slow, stately melody, is a gleaming hovercraft of a tune, pretty clearly modeled after the Blade Runner soundtrack, and the closing track, "Blade", doesn't even try to hide its inspiration, as augmented chords dissolve into fizzy streamers.
For all the album's modest ambitions, it doesn't lack for variety. "Pinking", which opens the album, is the lone track to feature something like vocals, in the form of the gauzy choral pads familiar from New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies. It's a wisp of a thing—just two-and-a-half minutes of harpsichord-like chimes and celestial sighs. It would be easy to imagine it as the basis of a Depeche Mode song, and who knows, it might have made a great one. But it's pretty much perfect as it is. Too much music is led astray by its creators' attempts to add more; the great beauty of MG is that at a certain point while he was plugging in cables and twisting knobs, Gore simply said, "Enough," and it was.
7,2 - by Philip Sherburne
Az eredeti cikk itt található: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20410-mg/
