Violator!

It's burned into my brain to the point I barely need to listen to it anymore, but I think this probably is still the best album ever made. I've never really taken to the Violator b-sides though (or many DM b-sides at all)

I don't think I've ever heard a song from this, on the radio, on the stereo, in the car, where it hasn't made me think this could be the best produced and mixed album of all time.

Yeah I'm always struck by how crisp it sounds. Obviously this album has its forebears and influences, but from that standpoint alone you could make an argument for it being the "first nineties album".

It also makes for a very interesting contrast to the previous album, since Music for the Masses was almost scaled to sound like it was echoing in an arena, not that they were there yet. But there's a lot of reverb, echo etc. throughout, a thick-sounding release for lack of a better term. Whereas Violator clicks out of the gate and you can always hear the space in each song, for the most part.

Absolutely. I'd say that one of the things I always struggled with on Music For The Masses (only in relative terms - it's obviously a great album) is that the sound of it made it feel quite distant for precisely the reasons you identify - as compared to the "up close" sleazy intimacy of Violator.

To be fair, if you were up close to “Never Let Me Down Again” all of the skin would be blasted off of your body

Why here's Dave shedding some skin now in just that circumstance:

https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/dm-rose-bowl-101.jpg

help i'm addicted to listening to violator

since Music for the Masses was almost scaled to sound like it was echoing in an arena, not that they were there yet.

they were already playing arenas on the Black Celebration tour!

Hmm, fair. Stadia, then.

The Perfecto mix of "Never Let Me Down Again" solves my intimacy problems.

I'll add another vote to the movement making Violator among the best mixed of albums. The guitars, keyboards, and vocals get discrete spaces yet sound as if they could turn into each other -- not even Achtung Baby sounded like this.

er, Split Mix of NLMDA, I meant.

I loved it as a cassette in my Ford Escort then, I love it on fancy-schmancy speakers now

not even Achtung Baby sounded like this.

It's funny, because not long after I posted I started thinking of other candidates and I briefly considered "Achtung." And of course that is an impeccably made album (one that clearly had an influence on subsequent Depeche, and everyone else, too), but it has the benefit of a kind of at times intentionally blurry, imprecise shoegazing element to it. Whereas "Violator," yeah, it's just got such a perfect sense of space. Everything is exactly where it needs to be, and yet it's never static. It's electronic, but so alive. Things are bouncing around, moving, the balance of low end and treble is astounding, things sit and float and pierce right where they need to, at the exact right time and place, and it's never distractingly dense with information. Flood is a genius, of course, but François Kevorkian was no slouch.

I think New Order got it with PC&L, or Simple Minds on New Gold Dream

Achtung Baby sounds very much like the album you make if you’re hip to both the precision of Violator and the blurriness of shoegazer/early grunge and want to pay tribute to both at once.

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.