587 Depeche Mode - Violator (1990)

 587 Depeche Mode - Violator (1990)

Studio Album - Synth-pop


About the Act:

Depeche Mode came from Basildon. That's somewhere in the south of England, one of those dull towns that everybody's heard of, but nobody knows anything about. They formed in 1980 and became popular quite quickly. At the start they had Vince Clark who later was in Yazoo, The Assembly and Erasure. They are still going, 42 years later. They have had a whopping 54 songs on the UK singles chart, 17 top ten albums, and have sold more than 100,000,000 records worldwide. That's a lot of records. 

About the Album:

This was their seventh album.

My History with this Album:

None

Review:

I think it must be from the age of about sixteen that I have been mixing up Depeche Mode and New Order. How silly of me. I have reviewed a coupl of New Order albums and when I saw this was coming up was wondering if it would be like the others. I even listened most of the way through the album thinking "this is better than those previously reviewed albums". In fact it was only when I started looking up information on the album that I realised my mistake. The is not New Order, this is Depeche Mode. I think that maybe there was a time while I was at school that the people who were "into" Depeche Mode were also into New Order and before that Joy Division. Maybe there is a somewhat similarity of sound. A bit.

So, this is synthpop, a deep male voice singing over electronic drums and keyboards and some other sounds. It is quite up-tempo mostly, and has that kind of 80s vibe, but as we are (just) into the 90s the sounds are richer and more reverberant. It's poppy and mostly accessible, but it's got a quirky edge to it. There are little passages at the starts and ends that are more unusual. The last track Clean is great, musically, with a sound stolen from Pink Floyd, but a nice take on it, and some odd sounds. The lyrics *might* be about detoxing or de-drugging. Another track, Enjoy the Silence, I recognised from airplay, but it has some odd stuff at the end that doesn't make the radio play. Blue Dress is somewhat sinister in outlook, and my favourite track on the album is Personal Jesus, which can be interpreted several ways, but I recognise as something I have heard before. I wondered if I might recognise it from a cover version and discovered that I might have done, by either Marilyn Manson or Johnny Cash, and have to admit that a song that can be credibly covered by people as diverse as that has to have some legs. 

I enjoyed it, it was a steering-wheel tapping experience, as was the last album (Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814), and as is the next one, but no spoilers...

7.6/10


Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0Tg76MY2wNK4j37iCb6qyH

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-v2ZeBazuxHDL7_CWTaBp6nf_g7kQe4p

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violator_(album)



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