Depeche Mode, Sounds Of The Universe

By Lisa Anderson

The boys of Depeche Mode and I go way back. This relationship has had its ups and downs, but the romance has been rekindled. I was able to reconnect with them last month when they released Sounds Of The Universe, their first new album in four years.

I still remember watching their videos on MTV, on lazy Saturday afternoons with my best friend. If I were a genre of music, I do believe it would be New Wave: the only band I liked better in middle and high school was INXS. My friend didn’t like “Enjoy The Silence” very much, but I thought its electronic tones were sublimely beautiful. We agreed, however, on the hard, driving rhythms of “Personal Jesus.”

Violator, the album with those songs, only yielded more treats—rich and bittersweet like dark chocolate. The follow-up, Songs of Faith and Devotion, and the older Music for the Masses then established a trend. Their songs painted a world full of longing, persecution, moral ambiguity, and, well, more longing. It proved a perfect soundtrack for the angst and budding sexuality of adolescence.

Somewhere along the way, though, something happened.

Mode front man Dave Gahan attempted suicide in 1995, then overdosed on drugs in 1996, my freshman year in college. At that time, I never would have believed that he would still be making music thirteen years later, and that INXS singer Michael Hutchence would be dead in just over a year. But that’s another story.

Summer of the next year, I had an office job. One day, I borrowed Depeche Mode’s latest album, Ultra, from a co-worker. It was not the Mode I knew. I found it whiny and dissonant and listless. Years later, watching a collection of videos by director Anton Corbijn, I would come to like “It’s No Good”—but it’s probably my least favorite of their singles. I’m not sure if I finished the album, and I had no inclination to hear it again, much less buy it.

I was out of college before they released another new album. I recall sitting in a hotel room in Germany, listening to the club beats of “I Feel Loved” and feeling very happy to be in Germany. However, when I got my hands on that album—Exciter—it was a disappointment in the many of the same ways as Ultra. Ditto 2005’s Playing the Angel. I would be driving to work and find myself absolutely transported by “Precious” when it came on the radio, only to buy the CD and skip past aimless and toothless tunes to hear it.

Both of those albums were as disappointing as a defective firecracker, and they both suffered the same fate: sold to a used CD store for quick cash.

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