Depeche Mode - Black In The Night (NME, 1986) | dmremix.pro

Depeche Mode Black In The Night (NME, 1986)

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Black In The Night
[NME, date unknown (March 1986). Words: Steve Sutherland. Picture: John Stoddart.]
This review comes as a great antidote to those of us who adore Black Celebration now, but forget that we probably disliked it on the first hearing. It's also a reminder that a lot of "great" music only sounds "great" with hindsight. The writer finds much of the content laughable, but it's not hard to empathise, and to his credit he doesn't slip into abusing the whole album. Not a "good" review, but a quality one.
" It’s depressing, though, that in their own small struggle for personal and artistic dignity, Depeche have only managed to trade in one set of cliches for another – white for black, bright for bitter, tunes for twisted chants. "
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The same old song. That Depeche Mode are willing to worm their way out of their lucrative niche as mega-cuddlies is encouraging even if they’ve been at it so long they’ve fashioned a career from sweet abrasion. Damn sure they know they’ll never swap their teddy bear image for chart terrorism but the effort has become the sole fuel to Martin Gore’s fixations.

It’s depressing, though, that in their own small struggle for personal and artistic dignity, Depeche have only managed to trade in one set of cliches for another – white for black, bright for bitter, tunes for twisted chants.

“Black Celebration” finds Depeche even more over-anxious than they were on the depressing “Some Great Reward” to shock for the sake of it, pussycats desperate to appear perverted as an escape from the superficiality of teen stardom. “Dressed In Black” is just “Master And Servant” revisited, an adolescent masturbatory fantasy. [1] Similarly, “Fly On The Windscreen” attempts to evoke the claustrophobic swamp intertia of Mute labelmate Nick Cave’s “Wings Off Flies”. These songs tell us, time and again, that they’re desensitised to love, that the only release open from spiritual malaise is a momentary tactile passion, a lunging, groping lust.

More saddening still is “New Dress”, an unbridled attack on press hypocrisy which, in its humourless juxtaposition of headlines, (“Famine horror, millions die”) against its refrain (“Princess Di is wearing a new dress”) recalls nothing more than a secondary school poem.

As always, it’s difficult to discern whether Martin Gore’s clumsy lyrical truisms are intent on promoting his over-apparent desire to assume a sinister dimension on whether he’s honestly concerned for his subject matter. Are the Depeche of “A Question Of Time” revelling in the scenario of under-age sexploitation as an exercise in biting the hand the feeds, or are they genuinely dismayed at the inevitable moral decay of this rotting nation?

Then again, it’s precisely Gore’s naively logical lyrical equation, wedded to the established Depeche linear musical mode, that occasionally adds up to something successfully whole, something that incorporates optimism. The title track’s a throbbing metallic purging of the daily grind, “Stripped” is pleasingly minimal, if mannered, and there’s a wonderful hope in the appalling “New Dress”: “You can’t change the world / But you can change the facts / And when you change the facts / You change points of view / If you change points of view / You may change a vote / And when you change a vote / You may change the world”.

But it’s when Depeche are being unconsciously throwaway, when they relax their straining against their reputation, that they attain the sublime. “A Question Of Lust” is gorgeous, an Almondesque torch vocal mounting a simple electronic code worthy of The Human league. Mostly, though, “Black Celebration” is Depeche fucking with their formula and the real shock is the insight it provides into the troubled psyche of Martin Gore, a lad struggling to grow in public and, for all his opportunities, finding only sleaze and filth to feed off. They’d have it sickening – Gore a willing victim desiring the symptoms he purports to despise.

Silly boys.

[1] - Now this is the only remark in the whole piece that I have to raise exception to, as it doesn't sound all that well thought-out. Admittedly Martin never sounds quite convincing when he claims that Master And Servant is about workplace power-games and that the wall-to-wall S&M imagery is just that. But the energetic pace of the song means the tone is anything but sexual, whereas the much slower Dressed in Black is sultry bordering on hypnotic, and lyrically is a forerunner to Blue Dress.
 
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