In praise of...Music for the Masses by Depeche Mode

Rank the songs on "Music for the Masses"

The Things You Said
Never Let Me Down Again (an easy #1 if we're talking about live versions)
Little 15
Behind &Tuml;he Wheel
Strangelove (would have been higher had I made this list in 1989)

I Want You Now
Pimpf
Nothing
To Have and To Hold
Sacred

There's a significant discontinuity in quality between the top half and the bottom half of that list. In my view, this does not apply to "Violator", which is one reason why I think it's a better album.

but the aggro mix of never let me down ... oh, supplicate before the jackbooted genius.

ned, that was wonderful: thank you. funny you should bring this up: i hadn't listened to music for the masses for years - maybe eight or nine - and then i picked up a copy for six francs when i was on holiday in france last september. i nearly posted something here about it, oddly: the sheer visceral fucking joy of hearing an album again after so long; something you used to love yet, for whatever reason, neglected. the only other time i've experienced that is when i heard bowie's low again after a five or six-year gap.

violator is and always will be my core depeche album, but that's only because i heard it first and it blew my tiny teenage mind. but - objectively - hasn't masses stood the test of time better? it still sounds like nothing else; or, rather, nothing else has ever quite managed to sound like it.

Promises me I'm safe as houses
As long as I remember who's wearing the trousers

I agree that Never Let Me Down Again is probably their best single.

I know what you mean. Great piece of writing there, Ned.

oh, and more praise for Ned

This is one of those Great Mysteries.

Always wondered something: during the fade-out of "Never Let Me Down," Gore sings behind Gahan's repetion of the title. The lyrics sound something like....

See the stars are shining bright...

After that, I've never caught the end to the couplet. Any ideas?

Simple-sounding, but when you consider the song's about being in a drug-induced high, somehow appropriate.

Agreed. More like a Pinkish-Grey Celebration.

Unexpected highlight joy of seeing them at Dodger Stadium in 1990 -- Martin Gore, solo with acoustic guitar, singing BC album track "Here is the House," never released as a single or anything...and the entirety of Dodger Stadium singing along word for word, as best as I could tell.

I think I have a bootleg recording of this show ... if not that exact show, then another one on the "Violator" tour when he performed that song (which was very rarely).

One weird thing about "Black Celebration" is that the saddest song on it ("World Full of Nothing") isn't a very dark-sounding song at all.

Track by track:
Strangelove
The Things You Said
Little 15
Never Let Me Down Again
Nothing
Pimpf
Behind the Wheel
To Have and To Hold
Sacred
I Want You Now

Well thank ya Tim, yours is a fine one in turn. :-) Those bonus tracks are certainly grand and maybe I'll do an adjunct post on them. Did you snare all the recent remixes that came out with the box set and the singles?

Along with New Order, Depeche Mode left an INDELIBLE mark on my musical development - I've forgotten how many times I've referenced / cribbed / ripped them off wholesale over the years.(Oddly enough, I've never sampled either artist.) Even though my own work has become increasingly house- and techno- focused over the years, these guys are still relevant as fuck to me.

I don't have my vinyl copy of this anymore, so it's time to go get this and Black Celebration in one shot.

Seriously, that was a plummy spew of love, and I don't say that lightly.

Still, I prefer Black Celebration--it has that goth Liza Minelli thing you just can't find enough of these days.

"pimpf" really is a pretty silly song, though.

I always thought Little 15 was about a mother and daughter, with the mother wanting to recapture her youth through her teenaged girl.

er, francs euros, i meant. jesus, i'm a twat sometimes.

PEEEEEMPF

HOOOOO

PEEEEEEEEEEPMF

HOOOOOOO

PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEMPF

really? how so? it sounds fine to me.

Violator
Music For the Masses
Ultra
Black Celebration
Speak and Spell
Songs of Faith and Devotion
Some Great Reward
Construction Time Again
Exciter
A Broken Frame

hey now, this may be true Ned, but if i'm remembering rightly this album was the first real use on DM records of any "guitar parts" full stop? and Martin was actually still learning to play i think, so it may have been basic as much from ability as intention. can't argue with the end result in any case though.

but, ah this just reminded me of some friends back in the day who always sang pimpf as "more..... beeer". brain surgeons, them.

Martin learned how to play guitar when he was ten or so. ;-)

By all accounts Martin composes most of his songs on acoustic or electric guitar, and he's well known for apparently always having a guitar with him or nearby, so it's not like he's afraid of the darn things. ;-) So in ways that's why I'm impressed with him as a guitarist -- he aims for the killer hook first and foremost, which in large part is why Depeche songs with guitar feature just that hook and nothing more, in that nothing more is needed. "Enjoy the Silence" is the almost paradigmatic example...

Does it really have anything to do with the "joys of drug use" though??

Ultra is easily the best of their 90s albums IMO; it's much more cohesive than SOFAD and it isn't completely forgettable two weeks later the way that Exciter is.

funny how 7 years later I don't really like Ultra all that much and am really, really, really bullish on Exciter (which still isn't as good as Violator)

also, "Never Let Me Down", "Strangelove" and "The Things You Said" all own hardcore

Especially in their various album mixes.

oh yeah, the single version of "Strangelove" is TERRIBLE and embarrassing tbh

I don't think there's a version of "Never Let Me Down Again" that I've heard that I've disliked, though

There is not one song on this album that I dislike.

I like the remix of "Behind the Wheel" that was on the single more than the album version (probably because I heard the single first)

I had all of the remixes back in the day on a cassette tape, but I couldn't even tell you what they sounded like now.

I like this record but still prefer Violator even if I think about it for more than a few seconds the later album has as much filler.

violator is the ne plus ultra of zero filler albums!

don't like "Blue Dress" or "Clean"

well that's just crazy

Great thread, yawl. What a magnificent op too. Love the love for Agent Orange, I keep going back to it. They have some very pretty instrumentals.

Ned, I hope you're going to vote in this one.

Alas, you'll have to make do without me.

booooooooooooooooooooo

it would be politically and philosophically incorrect to know Ned's top 20 songs by any of his favorite bands. he gave us Ned's Nineties and anyone who dares connect the dots further from there is on their own.

Our loss that any alliterative decades are a long ways off (unless he has a Scooby Doo-style change of heart in 28 years and brings us Raggett's Rirties).

Now that would be a vision.

run rundred rirty eight best ralbums

I always tend to prefer the album mixes of Depeche tracks over their single versions. For me, the single versions of 'Strangelove' and 'A Question Of Time' seem to lack the power that the album versions have. I suppose the Zephyr mix of 'In Your Room' is an interesting and different take on the song, but for me there is nothing more powerful than the 6-minute dark and atmospheric-as-fuck album version.

My favourite version of 'Never Let Me Down Again' is the one on 101 where they segue into the remix briefly for the middle section. I often find myself listening to it and wishing that they could have put that pulsing bass synth section into the album version.

I've always found 'Blue Dress' and 'Clean' closes the Violator album perfectly. Granted, neither of them are as anthemic as many of the tracks that came before, but those songs are definitely in the right place on the tracklist. The way that 'Blue Dress' segues into 'Clean' via that interlude piece is one of the highlights of the album for me!

Love the video for the album mix of Strangelove. They look so fucking bored in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yurcWr84s5I&feature=related

Also I love that they're projecting this big heart shape on everything but stretched out it's like they're illuminated by a big nutsack.

Party time is here again!

https://c1.staticflickr.com/2/1560/24707332820_3da1b89669_n.jpg

So, happily borrowing some wording from my first post up there (but it's mostly all new):

http://thequietus.com/articles/23166-depeche-mode-music-for-the-masses-review-anniversary

Awesome piece, Ned.

I too was in Los Angeles at this time, too young to attend anything but old enouogh to have already be absolutely in love with music, and missing the Rose Bowl show was devestating to me at the time. Instead I sat on the backyard patio of my parent's house and listened to the KROQ broadcast of the event. I was bummed but I still felt part of something that was happening.

I don't know about other cities in the world in 1988 but it's hard to understate just how massive Depeche Mode were in Los Angeles at that time. It was Beatlemania when they'd show up somewhere. Even though I'd already become educated in and deeply affected by the entire New Order/Factory/Saville mythos by the time and was mostly consumed by that stuff, Depeche Mode still felt very much a part of everything that was important to me as I was becoming obsessed with music and this album is the sound of that time. In contrast, it took a long time for me to get into 'Violator' because of how minimal, angular, and cold most of it sounded to me in comparison.

Yeah I definitely take the point on Violator's 'cooler' feel -- which may seem strange given "Personal Jesus" and its massive stomp, but I think that also serves the album pretty well in comparison. When I first heard it on the day of release, I remember thinking from the get-go how sharp it sounded at points.

I don't find Violator an angular or cold record at all. There was a bit of a trend of synthpop acts returning to analogue synths in the early '90s. Behaviour and Chorus being a couple of other examples of this.

Well, you're wrong. :-D (I am busy and can't get into this further right now.)

Heh! I agree that the record feels minimal by comparison... Black Celebration and Music for the Masses are quite layered records and there's quite a fair bit going on under the surface, whereas Violator is simpler - not that this is a bad thing.

whereas Violator is simpler - not that this is a bad thing.

This said, I still prefer the many layered and huge sounding approach of Masses over everything else.

I don't agree with the characterization of Violator as "stripped down". It only really describes "Waiting for the Night" and mmmmmmmaybe "Blue Dress". The other 8 songs build and layer in much the same way the songs on Music for the Masses do.

The big difference for me is that Violator is a lot crisper, whereas the previous two albums (and some before) are very reverb-y. Violator is still quite layered though

Violator is still quite layered in places but I think yesca is kinda OTM and that it is much less symphonic and a simpler record than the two albums before it.

Take something like 'Fly on the Windscreen - Final' for example, the mix on that is so dense and there's a lot going on that's buried in there, whereas something like 'World In My Eyes' gets by with a bass synth, percussion and a string synth that either provides the chords but just as often just provides these sustained single notes. Of course, there's things that pop up here and there as the track moves along - the backwards sound going into the chorus or the dink-dink dink-dink's in the chorus itself but bass synth, string synth and drum programming is the core of that track.

Well this is cool -- first time Martin's sung "The Things You Said" in thirty years. In fact, quite literally the first time since the 101 show!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLM8BpG-AyY

The newly updated only-3-songs-from-the-new-album idea, is a winner. I got a glum text from a pretty big fan who was at the London show; “Half an hour in, nothing pre-Ultra..” so its good to see there’s been a bit of a shake up.

Great to hear The Things You Said again, easily in my
Top 10.

I think the 101 show is still the last time they did 'People are People', too... their biggest hit thst they don't play.

*that

And for a long time 101 was the last lap for Just Can’t Get Enough too but then they started doing it as an encore in the ‘98 ‘Singles’ tour era. That 101 show was really the end of .. something.

Yeah, it's strange... like, 101 must have felt like the band were at their absolute peak at the time, but after Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion and all the success since then, in the rearview mirror that whole period feels weirdly transitional.

As I muttered in my Quietus piece. :-)