Depeche Mode: Violator (Mute Stumm 64)
[The Times, 23rd March 1990. Words: Uncredited.]
The most enduring of all those funny Eighties synth-pop groups with singers who looked like Eric Idle, Depeche Mode now has the assured touch of an international touring colossus, yet continues to inhabit its own mysterious universe, parallel to the rock mainstream.
The band’s music retains its cold grandeur, the forbidding keyboard orchestration on “Halo” carrying the faint whiff of totalitarian political rallies convened in vast stone palaces of culture.
There is, too, an unfashionably louche hedonism at work, most noticeably in “Sweetest Perfection”, an unabashed hymn to the pleasures of intravenous drug-taking which has a more believable tang than does much of the anti-drug orthodoxy that pop groups now peddle so routinely in their lyrics. [1]
There are twiddly post-Doctor Who keyboard noises on “Waiting For The Night” and “Clean”, but it is the commitment to great pop melodies, sculpted in clean, classic lines that predominates, particularly on the singles “Personal Jesus” and “Enjoy The Silence”.
Best of all is “Policy Of Truth”, where a slinky, eel-like guitar motif is lashed to a chugging backbeat, overlaid with a crystalline keyboard riff and topped off by a mournful vocal, propounding, naturally enough, the virtues of deceit.
It is the sound of hi-tech machines suffering an unlikely dose of the blues.
[The Times, 23rd March 1990. Words: Uncredited.]
The most enduring of all those funny Eighties synth-pop groups with singers who looked like Eric Idle, Depeche Mode now has the assured touch of an international touring colossus, yet continues to inhabit its own mysterious universe, parallel to the rock mainstream.
The band’s music retains its cold grandeur, the forbidding keyboard orchestration on “Halo” carrying the faint whiff of totalitarian political rallies convened in vast stone palaces of culture.
There is, too, an unfashionably louche hedonism at work, most noticeably in “Sweetest Perfection”, an unabashed hymn to the pleasures of intravenous drug-taking which has a more believable tang than does much of the anti-drug orthodoxy that pop groups now peddle so routinely in their lyrics. [1]
There are twiddly post-Doctor Who keyboard noises on “Waiting For The Night” and “Clean”, but it is the commitment to great pop melodies, sculpted in clean, classic lines that predominates, particularly on the singles “Personal Jesus” and “Enjoy The Silence”.
Best of all is “Policy Of Truth”, where a slinky, eel-like guitar motif is lashed to a chugging backbeat, overlaid with a crystalline keyboard riff and topped off by a mournful vocal, propounding, naturally enough, the virtues of deceit.
It is the sound of hi-tech machines suffering an unlikely dose of the blues.