We're going backwards ignoring the realities

Continuing my trip back through the 2017 album charts.

24/03/17 : Spirit - Depeche Mode


Our fourth visit with DM and this is another one I've never heard - I'm expecting it to be interesting, if not necessarily loveable.

Yup, that's pretty much where we are. I appreciate they've done a good job in moving their music on throughout their career and taking their fans with them, but the problem I have is that I really like their early poppy stuff and their later gothy phase - and I just think they sound tired on their later albums (I guess they are old geezers now!). So whilst there's nothing wrong with this, there's nothing to make me listen to it again as opposed to sticking on one of their earlier best-ofs.

We're at #5 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of a surprisingly brief five week run - they've never really been appreciated here as much as they are elsewhere. The rest of the top five were Ed Sheeran, Drake (a new entry), Vera Lynn (another new entry to celebrate her 100th birthday which I'm definitely not going to subject myself to) and Rag'n'Bone Man, with the next highest new entry being Zara Larsson (#7). I feel I should also point out that there are two more Ed Sheeran albums in the top ten - X (#6) and + (#10), which we have, somewhat surprisingly, met yet.

Wikipedia tells us it's their fourteenth album and the last to feature Andy Fletcher before his death in '22 - his Wikipedia entry tells me that he was in the same sixth form class as Martin Gore and Alison Moyet, which is a pretty musically talented bunch. Back to this album, it is, like quite a few we've seen this year, driven by current events with Dave Gahan understatedly putting it "we're really kind of upset about what's going on in the world". Things were actually so bad that "the closing track "Fail", is the first time the band used profanity in their music", although that could also be because they (particularly Dave and Martin) weren't really getting on, so it was a fraught recording process. 

The critics were split on the album, with some thinking that they left it a bit late to get political (which feels a bit simplistic to me, but I'm not an expert) but it still made quite a few year-end lists. Commercially it did very well, getting to #1 in Austria, Belgium, Czechia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland - Europe really loves these guys (they've had EIGHT #1 albums in Germany). It also got to #5 in the US, becoming their eighth top ten album over there. 

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent CD version for £3.50, but if you want the red clear double "etched all media" vinyl release, it's going to set you back £120 - I bet it looks super cool, but I think I can live without. I admire later period Depeche Mode for their longevity (or even just their existence) but I'm afraid I can't get too excited about their music - but I know there's a whole load of Europeans that disagree with me.

17/03/17 - Not for me
31/03/17 - A cynical button-pushing exercise

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