Depeche Mode will be performing at the Letzigrund in Zurich on 18 June. Almost 30,000 tickets for the concert have already been sold, which would have gone much earlier. The trio seems to have its best years behind it. The band still makes good records and gives great concerts, as their performances took place three years ago in the Hallenstadion. Nevertheless, she has not achieved a top ten hit in the US since 1990, and she has been waiting for her in her home country for eight years. This is unusual for a band that has sold over 100 million records. And that made it on dozens of hit singles to combine the individual with the catchy.
Spirit is the new, fourteenth album. Without exaggeration it can be said that singer, songwriter and songwriter Dave Gahan, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Martin Gore and bassist and keyboarder Andy Fletcher have never published in their career such a gloomy collection of songs. Doubt, loneliness and violence dominate the lyrics, the music is slow, long-drawn, Gahan sounds with his dark, low-modulation voice as if he had not seen the light for a long time. And so the twelve songs on the new album, which will be released in the middle of March,
1. Going Backwards: A slow-paced, ball-instrumented ballad, punctuated by a simple melody, opens the album and sets the tone that is held over the entire disk. We move backwards, sing Gahan, have no more respect and no control. An insistent resignative song, pop music for the night. One can imagine it very well under the starry sky of the Letzigrund.
2. Where's the Revolution: The first single of the album, which you can understand. The song is genre, the pulsating electronics sounds elegant, the refrain has a train. But even if the message of the song in the accompanying video is ironized, it is still hard to bear, especially since irony does not sound: Come, folks, you disappoint me, where is your rebellion? You have been lied, you have been chosen for yourselves, you are addicted to patriotism (in English, after all, more elegant: "You're patriotic junkies"). Even if the song was created before the election of Donald Trump, he sounds like a comment on his campaign. This does not make the criticism of singing multimillionaires any better. Radical Chic called the Tom Wolfe, the American writer. Nice piece, bland text.
3. The Worst Crime: Again a ballad, held more conventional, but nice to hear. The economical arrangement makes the choral singing more effective.
4. Scum: A faster, exciting piece, which clearly points to earlier ideas of the band. And one proof of this is that the CD length of 70 minutes not only has advantages. The band would have thrown such a number before.
5. You Move: When the world is so bad, love does not help anymore. A love declaration to the past of a relationship. The happiness we could have had. Another ballad, again the fundamental tone is gloomy and the singer hopeless. A short melody, which is so easy to catch up with power, swings up briefly and falls back together.
6. Cover Me: "I felt better," Gahan sings, still fixed on the past. His voice sounds as if he came from a deep sleep. One could imagine Sinatra as a singer. "Cover Me" is a highlight of the new album in its elegant, tight instrumentation. "Beyond Black and White," sings Gaham; The music on this album sounds the opposite: "Spirit" is a strict study in black and white.
7. Eternal: This time Martin Martin sings, electric strings encircle him, the play remains unusually short and coherent.
8. Poison Heart: The hardest piece of the record, a heavy rhythm drives the musicians forward, the song is crushed by its own weight, sounds unfinished, remains superfluous.
9. So Much Love: On this late song, Depeche Mode sounds the most likely to sound Depeche Mode: metallic in the instrumentation, melodic in its flair for pop, rhythmic for the dance floor. Well done.
10. Poorman: And then it goes back even further into the musical past of the band - into the years when Vince Clarke was still sitting on the keyboards before starting with Alison Moyet Yazoo and later Erasure with Andy Bell. Also, the text sounds like a sampling of old lines. Still a very nice song, maybe the best on this record. Sad melody, pulsating backbeat.
11. No More (This Is The Last Time): The whole song sounds as if Depeche Mode would say goodbye to their audience with this album: We repeat the process, repeat the line, over and over again. Sung beautifully, of complete gloom.
12. Fail: Delicate melody, beautiful song, but not really necessary.
