By Paul Esau (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: April 10, 2013
I was first introduced to Depeche Mode at the tender age of 16, when a pirated CD was pressed into my sweaty palm by my long-haired, kilt-wearing, half-Vietnamese gym buddy and blood brother.
“I think you’ll like this,” he said.
It was the first non-Christian album (besides the score to Disney’s Tarzan) I’d ever owned.
My parents hated it, and, perhaps for that reason, it quickly became my first true musical love. It was 2005’s Playing The Angel, and it was quite the departure from Tarzan, DC Talk and the Newsboys.
I still have most of that album memorized, thanks to a post-breakup binge in my senior year. I think I lay on the floor for about two weeks straight and sang along, with all the anger and heartbreak my teenage heart could muster. All the songs were perfect for my pain, I lived the music, I was consistently two tones flat and loud enough to shake the rafters.
If my parents weren’t such wonderful, God-fearing saints they would have bludgeoned down my door and beaten me to death with own stereo. I wouldn’t have blamed them.
Eventually I got up off the floor and recanted my hasty vow to enter a monastery in some suitably foreign place (preferably that Tibetan one run by Liam Neeson). Yet my love affair with Depeche Mode stayed strong. I still believe in a “Personal Jesus” who will “Never Let Me Down Again.” I’m still going to marry a girl named “Lillian.”
I am “walking love incarnate” (sometimes with morning breath).
So when DM’s newest album dropped on March 22, I was more excited than three 50-year-old British metrosexuals should be able to make me. Despite the eccentricities and the glitter, despite DM’s bassist urging “someone” to “shoot Simon Cowell” in an interview with Music Week, despite the weird chicken-winging that is vocalist Dave Gahan’s standard dance move … I couldn’t wait.
Delta Machine is not Violator. It’s a subtle, smoother Depeche, with a bluesy infusion that’s all Gahan. Yet it is closer to the Mode of the ‘90s than 2009’s Sounds of the Universe, albeit with decidedly modern electronic scintillation to ground Gahan’s baritone. Somewhere in the background Martin Gore dramatically strums his guitar and deploys unexpected harmonies, while Andy Fletcher provides the rolling synthesized darkness that Depeche is known for.
I ate it up. From the first notes to the final track, “Goodbye,” I was a gooey pile of fanboy mush. I love the weirdness, the metaphysical references to “angels,” “sin” and “soul.” I love the fact that Depeche Mode take themselves seriously without any of this self-referencing Macklemore crap. Gahan can sing “the angel of love was upon me, and Lord, I felt so small / The legs beneath me weakened, I began to crawl,” and it’s obvious that not only does he believe it, but he expects you to as well. Some might call it pretentious, but there’s something about Depeche that just destroys my incredulity. In fact, the rolling bluesy riff behind “Angel” makes the track the best on the album. It’s an apocalyptic seduction, a Revelation for the masses.
It makes my knees go weak.
Delta Machine won’t be for everyone; in fact, I’m pretty sure that everyone else in my family already hates it (although that may have something to do with repeated and relentless exposure). But for the true connoisseurs of electronic melancholy, those who are fully capable of lying on the floor and singing lines like “I’ll penetrate your soul / I’ll bleed into your dreams” without any twinge of embarrassment, this is the album you’ve been waiting for.
This is Depeche Mode in all their brooding, psuedo-religious brilliance. They will mess you up, they will play with your mind, they’ll strap you into their Delta Machine.
