Playing the Angel peaks with “Macro” and “I Want It All”. The aforementioned Thursday album is easier to get through than Playing the Angel, and that album has songs about planes crashes and kids getting flattened by trains. From “Precious”, Martin Gore’s ode to his children (written in the midst of a nasty divorce): “ Angels with silver wings / Shouldn’t know suffering / I wish I could take the pain for you”.
Here, they are swimming in the sad stuff and the backing tracks can’t hope to raise the material to something transcendent. “But John,” says someone driving by in a white convertible with stunner shades and a monkey in the back seat, “this is a Depeche Mode album! How can you criticize them for making depressing music? That’s what they do!” In response, I’d like to flip that person off and clarify that Depeche Mode are at their best when they tap into an undercurrent of shared misery and set it to music that you can dance to.
Then I thought, “WAIT! Aren’t these the guys who made a song called “Personal Jesus” and an album called Songs of Faith and Devotion?” Depeche Mode doesn’t strictly makes songs about Christianity, but that’s the most tangible theme going on in this album, and once the novelty wears off, we’re left with a series of miserable tunes that serve to kill the mood more than anything else. At first, this registered as an interesting statement, as though the constant need to believe in a higher power was constantly wrenching on the hearts of the band’s members. The title of the album, certain song titles, and many lyrics refer to elements of Christianity, and these go hand-in-hand with discussions of constantly being in pain. More problems became known, though, when I tried to find common themes throughout the album. “John the Revelator” and “Suffer Well” could have been sequenced into Violator easily, and “Precious” has the makings of a high point for the group. They have their niche, and they play it up for all that it is worth. The songs, for the first half of this album anyway, sound like most of Depeche Mode’s material, and I mean that as a compliment. Video can’t be loaded: Depeche Mode – Precious (Video) () It is worth noting that starting this loud album with a blaring siren really doesn’t help. Cranking up a guitar accomplishes more than cranking up a synthesizer, and even if Playing the Angel was otherwise flawlessly written and executed, this one flaw makes getting through it so much more exhausting than it needs to be. In the case of those albums, though, it could be argued that the overblown mastering was part of the intended aesthetic of both albums, and that excuse doesn’t fly with Playing the Angel, especially since the vinyl version was apparently mastered correctly. To be fair, this isn’t the only album commonly detailed in the “Record of Loudness War”-Sleater-Kinney’s earlier The Woods reportedly blew out Eddie Vedder’s speakers, and Thursday’s later A City By the Light Divided was also mastered a little too loud. Listening to Playing the Angel involves constantly fiddling with volume levels so that you can properly hear it without hurting your ears or blowing your speakers out, and that a synthpop album from a band that have been celebrated for their engineering prowess would feature such poor sound is mind-boggling.
I’m no audiophile, and audiophiles have already written wonderful articles detailing the technical shortcomings of Playing the Angel’s mastering ( like these), so I’ll try to break this down in practical terms. That fatal flaw, however, made itself known within the first second of the album: it is mastered horribly.
There were a few songs I had enjoyed on it (I’ll get to those soon enough), but there was some element about the album that had turned me off towards it, and sound unheard, I couldn’t recall what it was.
Video can’t be loaded: Depeche Mode – Suffer Well (Video) ()Īt the beginning of this week, I literally had not tried to listen to this album from start to finish in years, and I couldn’t remember why.