\u201cWe are the bigots.\u201d<\/p>\n
So begins the first line of Depeche Mode\u2019s new album, and it only gets bleaker from there. The early marketing for the album positioned it as a relevant, modern protest disc from the veteran gloomy synth-pop band, giving the impression that it was yet another artist speaking out against right-wing politics, Brexit, Trump, etc. <\/p>\n
But this is not exactly true, and it\u2019s why Spirit <\/i>is an unsettling but necessary listen. Depeche Mode turns the tables by looking at humanity <\/i>as a whole, asking how we even got to this point as a species. The whole of \u201cGoing Backwards\u201d asks the question that, despite all of our awesome technology and thousands of years of knowledge, we\u2019re still retreating to a caveman, me-first mentality, because maybe that\u2019s all we are capable of.<\/p>\n
This difference is important. Songwriters Dave Gahan and Martin Gore aren\u2019t calling out the political leaders; they are calling out YOU, the person who posts on Facebook comments sections, the person who proudly puffs out political opinions at family cookouts that he heard five minutes ago on Hannity that sounded good, the person who simply watches as his fellow man says and does reprehensible, racist, violent things and does nothing because, well, what can you do? A band like Green Day posits a youthful fuck-the-establishment mentality, and screw Trump and Steve Bannon while you\u2019re at it, and we need a revolution. Depeche Mode, wise sages that they are after 35 years, says \u201cWhere\u2019s the revolution \/ Come on, people, you\u2019re letting me down.\u201d Maybe we\u2019re all talk, because we sure as shit aren\u2019t doing <\/i>anything to make things better.<\/p>\n
Most late-period Depeche Mode albums value mood over catchy songs \u2013 as opposed to, say, 1990\u2019s superb Violator <\/i>\u2013 and this one isn\u2019t that different, focusing far more on the grim lyrics and the overall tone than on memorable, pop-friendly songs. \u201cThe Worst Crime\u201d is typical, a slow-paced near-elegy slog with lines like \u201cMisguided leaders \/ Apathetic hesitation \/ Uneducated readers \/ For whatever reason \/ We now find ourselves in this \/ We are all charged with treason.\u201d Sometimes, you have to stare into the mirror to realize you\u2019ve hit rock bottom before you actually do anything about it. Spirit <\/i>is easily the band\u2019s best album in over a decade, probably their most realized work since Ultra<\/i>, even if the music isn\u2019t as consistently catchy and memorable throughout the run time.<\/p>\n
Part of the album\u2019s appeal is its refusal to pull punches, most notably on \u201cPoison Heart\u201d and \u201cScum,\u201d which pulses and burbles under Floydian synthesizer washes and Gahan\u2019s overdriven computerized lyrics that snarl \u201cHey scum \/ What have you done for anyone,\u201d which could be directed at anybody, though one imagines he has a specific target in mind. The lament of \u201cPoorman\u201d is directed at all of us who like to pretend hunger and class differences don\u2019t exist (\u201cCorporations get the breaks \/ Keeping almost everything they make \u2026 When will it trickle down?\u201d Gahan intones, in one of the few explicitly left-wing moments on the record).<\/p>\n
The midsection of the album pauses the political for a set of electronic tracks that will likely be remixed for the club, including the purely physical \u201cYou Move,\u201d \u201cCover Me,\u201d which starts slow but transitions into an intense slow-burn EDM cut, and the mournful \u201cEternal,\u201d a moment of transparent promise from one lover to another. And in that vein of love comes \u201cSo Much Love,\u201d a relatively upbeat (for these guys) exhortation that love will <\/b>win, no matter who tries to stop it. It\u2019s the linchpin on which the rest of the record hangs and its placement toward the end seems intentional, because it\u2019s the band saying that we are truly capable of quelling our baser instincts, our apathy, our mob mentality tendencies, our judging and sniping, our religious differences and our fear of the unknown in order to treat each other with respect, to be human beings and not let things separate us.<\/p>\n
And the album never really arrives at that easy answer explicitly; it\u2019s up to the listener to figure out if things are hopeless, things are fine the way they are, or things can improve, and the band suggests all three at one point or another, because there are no easy answers. But Spirit <\/i>dares us to try.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":33061,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6979],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-44845","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-depeche-mode","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/44845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44845"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=44845"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=44845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}