Violator!

Would have been fun to write the book. And maybe one day I will.

Oh my. Most difficult poll yet.

http://thugradio.net/violator.jpg

http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/v/viol8r2.jpg

every song is a winner; i voted "Blue Dress" favorite, for personal reasons.

also: i betcha every song in this poll gets at least one vote.

- Yo, Miss Thing!
- Yo Merisa, what's up?
- You heard what happened at the Donut Hill the other night? - Yo I
was there and those De La kids was fighting, yo they was wildin'.
- Word man?
- Word, the whole thing happened in front of my face, yo, they was on
the dance floor, right, some kid stepped up to
them and said something about hippies, then punks, and the chubby one,
Plug Three?
- Yeah. Plug Three, yeah I know him.
- All right, Plug Three, all right, he walked up to this kid, hit him
real quick, think he didn't when he did, and then them
other kids the Jungle Brothers and Quest and, um, what's the other
ones, the other ones?
- The Violators.
- The Violators, right, right, throwing chairs, and they didn't care
who they was hitting, you think they wasn't?
- Yeah. I know, I thought it was supposed to be about peace signs,
things like that, you know...

Policy Of Truth

can't stp myself going for enjoy the silence...

I voted for "Clean" because I was in the mood for it, but normally I probably would have voted for something else. Not sure what.

unjustly praised song: Failure's cover of "Enjoy the Silence" which is utterly bested by the original.

agree/disagree?

"waiting for the night" ... it was between that and "enjoy the silence", but that seems a bit obvious, and i remember thinking WFTN was the most awesome thing i'd ever heard when i was 15. (and, indeed, trying to convince my jazz'n'blues-lovin' dad of the same. he wasn't convinced.)

i've had a discussion with ned about the "ping" noise at the end of "enjoy the silence", and about the "cru-ci-fied" interlude, so there must be some other violatin' thread going on here ...

Might have just been on a general Depeche thread, of which there are tons.

"Enjoy the Silence" one of my favorite songs ever. That song still gets played on the radio in Chicago all the time.

This is a good album, but not-so-good compared to Depeche Mode's earlier output. I think I like every single album they released before this one more.

even "a broken frame"?

(which i've recently rediscovered and think is wonderful. but i feel i'm alone in that.)

ESPECIALLY "A Broken Frame," which features some of their best songs AND their best instrumental.

All that you're saying
The games that you're playing

I think part of the reason "A Broken Frame" gets slagged off so much is that it doesn't work as an album like their later releases. It's more a loose collection of songs. Construction Time Again avoids this by being more or less a concept album; after that they played around enough with song textures & transitions to be a true album band as well as a singles band. But the songs on "A Broken Frame" are fantastic.

Hide what you have to hide, and tell what you have to tell.

"A Broken Frame" is OK, I guess.

I mean, I love all of their 80s output, and if there is one DM 80s album that is slightly overrated then "Music Is The Masses" is the one (their second worst album, only beaten by the U2/NIN-wannabe-album "Songs Of Faith And Devotion").

But "A Broken Frame" is slightly to shizo to be perfect in my book. The "dark" tracks are great, "The Meaning of Love" and "Photograph" are not.

Btw. I have now had the chance to hear the surround mixes, and they are fantastic. Particularly the ones for "Black Celebration", "Violator" and "Exciter".

"Photograph" is one of the weaker tracks on ABF but I still like it just fine. I'm kinda biased wrt stuff like "The Meaning of Love" because I spent much of my first year w/my current driving around listening to "Catching Up With Depeche Mode" and so all the cute early singles make me happy.

*w/my current gf

i've had a discussion with ned about the "ping" noise at the end of "enjoy the silence"
-- grimly fiendish, Sunday, October 28, 2007 5:00 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

i for one would absolutely *love* to read this.
anyone have a link? Ned? grimly?

come on guys!

i accidentally voted for enjoy the silence but should have voted 'policy of truth', i can't switch it though!

"Enjoy The Silence" is one of those rare Utterly Perfect Songs® and I had to vote for it, as much as I love about five other songs from this album.

I think I went with "Halo" last night but I want to change it to "Enjoy the Silence" now, argh.

"Enjoy The Silence' is awkward, bewildered romanticism on a par with some of the best New Order songs.

"Enjoy The Silence" is way better than anything ever made by New Order (not that I have anything against New Order either).

No, not better, I said "on a par with" ferchrissakes.

I'm going to wait for the final bump on this, I think. It's 'Clean' today, but will be something else tomorrow.

"enjoy the silence" is DM-do-NO and, while i love it, doesn't even come close to the great hewn-from-diamond NO moments.

somewhere i've got a massively lengthy mix of it on a cassette single, which is awe-inspiring.

"Enjoy The Silence" is one of those rare Utterly Perfect Songs®

my feelings exactly.

the sasha & digweed trance mix ain't bad.

Listening to "Enjoy the Silence" on Top 40 radio in the summer of '90 reminded me what "Like A Prayer" did to me the year before: it was filthy and utterly awesome.

I think part of the reason "A Broken Frame" gets slagged off so much is that it doesn't work as an album like their later releases. It's more a loose collection of songs. Construction Time Again avoids this by being more or less a concept album; after that they played around enough with song textures & transitions to be a true album band as well as a singles band. But the songs on "A Broken Frame" are fantastic.

I think this is exactly right.

BTW: "Waiting For The Night" is my vote but it was almost "Blue Dress" or "Policy of Truth". I'm guessing if one song doesn't get a vote, it will be "Sweetest Perfection".

A couple of years ago it would have been "Clean". Now I think I'll go with "Waiting for the Night". I fear that "World in my Eyes" will be overlooked, but it is an amazing opener.

I have to be predictable and vote for "Enjoy the Silence". You know, because it's one of my top two or three favourite songs ever.

"Sweetest Perfection" is definitely the ugly duckling here, but as the stopgap between two incredible singles, it works. They got the sequencing perfect with this one. Slot it anywhere else, and it hurts the album quite noticeably.

Sweetest Perfection is grebt! I used to think halo was a bit meh but really it's all good. No unfavourites on this album at all.

Policy of Truth doesn't get enough luv

^^^^^^^^ true

That reminds me I need to download NO's "Republic"...

wow. tough poll. was leaning towards 'clean' but in the end went with 'enjoy the silence' - it really IS one of those perfect songs.

and for those who haven't seen the new re-issue companion DVDs, the guys clearly didn't have a lot of love for 'a broken frame'. martin was quite frank about it being his least favourite DM album. however daniel miller was right - 'sun & the rainfall' is a killer track, neatly tucked away at the end of the album...

Sweetest Perfection is grebt!

It is, but I don't know a single person who wouldn't put at least one other song on the album ahead of it.

So many of the songs on A Broken Frame are really great in isolation (ESPECIALLY "The Sun and the Rainfall" and "Shouldn't Have Done That") but listening to that whole album at once really makes my skin crawl.

it's really only "a photograph of you" that upsets me about ABF. the rest of it -- all of it -- i love. yes, even "see you". and TS&TR is just blinding, yes.

agree with ledge: there's not a moment on this album that is less than wonderful. maybe i should have gone with "enjoy the silence" after all ... but it's bound to win, and i really do think "waiting for the night" is the pivotal track.

I wanted to vote "Enjoy the Silence," but couldn't bring myself to do it when half the arrangement is just a reworking of "Stripped."

As this has become almost as much a "Broken Frame" thread as a "Violator" one, just let me add that "Leave In Silence" and "Nothing To Fear" are both absolutely and totally ace!

NOT ENOUGH LOVE FOR "HALO."

There's that awesome moment when the string swoop right before doubletracked Gahan sings "It will be worth it" that's my favorite DM moment ever.

soooo. any other "Blue Dress" voters?

*crickets*

John Justen, if he sees this thread.

I remember that in an interview with Alan Wilder, in the Violator era, he commented that he had come to dislike the use of reverb, "because of the distancing effect it gives". So that sensibility was probably what lead to the unusual tautness of the album's sound.

agree that Violator is one of the cleanest, best-mixed albums I've ever heard, but it's also one of the best albums I've ever heard. MftM's reverb works too though, to different effect

It's curious that this record does sound so good, because the hallmark of their earlier records was cheap and junky sonics.

It's also curious that it sounds better than a lot of records sound today!

Flood is a genius. This album and Technique are the two best examples of "band goes digital" imo

I do know what you mean but it's very odd to me to say a the band that did all of the singles from "Everything's Gone Green" on "went digital" on a subsequent album

... or indeed, that a band that was using a Synclavier in 1983 only "went digital" in 1990. If anything, Violator saw a reemergence of their interest in analog synths, for basslines in particular.

for MftM, didn’t they intentionally seek out the dude that did songs from the big chair?

did = produced

When I say "band goes digital", I don't just mean sound sources so much as workflow. Pre-Technique New Order sounds light years away from Technique to my ears (same goes for Junk Culture and to a lesser extent, Very). I'm not particularly sure about "how DM worked in studio"-- Violator's sound sources sound largely analog, and I know that Vince (at the very least) was extremely resistant to using MIDI-based forms of composition, and preferred polyphonic CV-transmitting objects-- (who knows what cross-pollination in process there was between 90s DM and Vince, obv). Nevertheless Violator is the first DM album that sounds, conspicuously, to me, composed with digital sequencers. I could be wrong, just intuiting a process based on what I'm hearing

I parsed what you meant and got it, hence "I do know what you mean"; it was just meant to be a funny aside

“Technique” was the next album that came to mind when thinking about how well “Violator” is mixed.

I think I read an article once where Vince was bemoaning "MIDI stutter"-- that is, the fact that his ears were allergic to the non-synchronicity of sequential MIDI events. So, like, even using MIDI to control analog synths didn't work for him, so he sought out (and maybe even collaborated in the design of?) polyphonic CV boxes. Ironic then that "A Little Respect" is one of the most digital-sounding songs I've ever heard (and in general I don't really get along with Erasure's sound world at all)

Marianne Faithfull’s “Broken English” for some reason just popped into my head as well, but that doesn’t really fit the digital mode.

The starkest dip in quality re: "moving to digital" is ofc OMD who immediately went from "this is the best album ever" to "turn that shit off" and it took them til 2010 to go back to analog

Jean-Michel Jarre's relationship to analog-vs-digital is hugely interesting to me, the early low-bitrate MPC sound of "Zoolook" developing into full-tilt General MIDI Mike Postism ("Cousteau", "Chronologie")

Anyway, I bought the Violator vinyl reissue and it sounds great, listened to it this morning :)

mm I guess JMJ was using Fairlight, not MPC, similar idea tho

A JMJ quote (VMIC) that has always stayed with me, re: analog/digital, from around 1988 or so: "Do you want the girl who wears too much makeup, or the girl sliced into tiny pieces?" Something like that, anyway...

Which Erasure stuff did Flood produce? Pretty sure it was pre-Violator, but could be a good point of comparison.

Wonderland, no?

I think of so many albums I love as random but there's definitely through lines across the decades when you look at producers... Peter Walsh, John Fryer, John Leckie, Flood, etc.

Ross Robinson

for MftM, didn’t they intentionally seek out the dude that did songs from the big chair?

Dave Bascombe and yup, very intentionally. Incredibly good call! They had an excellent run with Miller and then Gareth Jones before that point, and it was a good switch and step up to try something further. (And I mean, if you're Jones and your last album with them is Black Celebration, you can definitely relax and think "Yeah, job well done.")

I’d say Wilder is at the very least 50% responsible for Violator’s sound. It’s a shame the guy can’t write a tune cause his sound vision is really amazing.

I’d say Wilder is at the very least 50% responsible for Violator’s sound. It’s a shame the guy can’t write a tune cause his sound vision is really amazing.

I used to think it was very bold of DM to use a different producer on each album from MftM up to Playing the Angel. Which is almost true but for years I simply assumed SoFaD was a different producer than Violator. remarkable how different those two albums sound given it was the same producer

Bascombe had a fantastic run from 85 to 87, in between ..Big Chair and MFTM he made It's Immaterial's Life's Hard And Then You Die. It's a brilliant record but they were pretty damn lucky getting him looking back, maybe he owed someone a favour.

Watching the documentary that came with the 25th anniversary reissues for the first time and I suspect that François Kevorkian has a lot to do with the sense of space on this album. Gore talks about him spending 2 days mixing a hi-hat. I was then reading about the 5.1 remasters and it mentioned that it had been complicated to separate some of the sounds used as FK had used multiple delays on “waiting for the night”

I’d always thought that Flood had been mainly responsible for the production, but it also sounds like FK’s mixing was integral to the process.

Off the back of that I had the CD on and my copy is skipping so I thought I’d google and see if it had been released digitally on some hi def format. I wouldn’t have objected to buying some 24 bit lossless file but it doesn’t look like Mute have released any.

OOF!(check out the music))

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCgdWHwEnrg

Which is funny because if anything it's Roxy/Bryan Ferry who is a throughline in the actual documentary (very deft uses of "The 'In' Crowd" and "Manifesto")

Oh! I must watch that, the trailer looked fantastic.

thinking about how strange it is that this album has had a pretty limited influence on synthpop revival stuff of the last two decades, pretty everything seems to draw much more on earlier 80s synthpop?

like it's the sort of album a band could surely have a whole career ripping off but ... ?

Musically, I feel it had a huge influence on the sharper, more industrial side of things; a lot of the '80s stuff people reference is softer and mushier, and besides, this album isn't an '80s album, and the band has plenty of more traditional synthpop from which people can draw. I do, however, feel Depeche Mode has become a pretty prominent songwriting influence, so they're still in the DNA of a lot of backwards-looking stuff.

Oh my @ some of these poll results. Blue Dress robbed at gunpoint. Talk about the sweetest perfection.

Violator is so sophisticated and slick, it seems harder to "borrow" from than earlier, simpler synth pop.

Musically, I feel it had a huge influence on the sharper, more industrial side of things

oh yeah certainly, just that this album has such a distinct & perfect balance of things that i'm a little surprised there isn't more that's trying to capture the same sort of sound

Even Depeche Mode have struggled to recreate it!

It reminds me of how there aren’t many pet shop boys imitators taking on “behaviour”

Maybe it’s the songs that are difficult to recreate, though? Couple of tracks I don’t remember so well but iirc it’s wall-to-wall bangers.

Songs Of Faith.. was probably more influential than Violator (on NIN, Marilyn Manson, Garbage, etc?)

yeah its influence is way more obvious, though i've read that the influence goes both ways & they were into NIN when making it as well?

They were def. into NIN by then. "Rush" is the most obvious one. Of course "Pretty Hate Machine" was released in 1989, and also produced by Flood, just prior to "Violator," so chances are good they heard it pretty early and it might have made an impression. But then of course, "Pretty Hate Machine" clearly owes a lot to Depeche Mode.

Pretty Hate Machine is Depeche plus late 80s Ministry and that’s why it rules.

My god, it's full of samples

https://dmlive.wiki/wiki/List_of_Depeche_Mode_sample_sources_by_album/Violator

Hmm, at first I was surprised, but most of those samples are just kind of manipulated library sources, or otherwise just literally samples, in that a lot of the sounds weren't necessarily programmed or designed from scratch. Still pretty cool to learn, thanks! And yeah, some of the actual samples incorporated into this masterpiece are as inspired as they are invisible. Toni Halliday! Alan Moulder didn't engineer or mix "Violator," though, and I'm not sure they were a couple yet, so is that just a coincidence that she was (literally) in the mix?

It reminds me of how there aren’t many pet shop boys imitators taking on “behaviour”

true

xp yeah loads of emu library sounds but a few very interesting sources in amongst them - especially the uses of fleetwood mac, kraftwerk, and the bulgarian state female voice choir.

Very interesting to me too, a lot more samples of popular music than I expected