Depeche Mode in a Solo Groove (or, damn, it's amazing Dave Gahan isn't dead)

Depeche Mode in a Solo Groove (or, damn, it's regrettable Dave Gahan isn't dead)

Of course, I don't assume it's necessarily worth hearing. We got the Gahan album at the college radio station in town and I didn't take it home to listen to. Can't say I was too curious.

(Must get Gore solo album too.)

You don't have that, yet? Uber-shame on you....

*and who the fuck wouldn't be?

And the Gahan single.... it just hasn't got that 'something' has it? And is he STILL using Aton Corbijn...?

Here comes the second album:

Depeche Mode front man DAVE GAHAN will release his second solo album - HOURGLASS - in late October (exact date to be announced).

...

While Depeche Mode is catching their breath, GAHAN recently returned to the studio to record an array of songs that would become HOURGLASS. Created without the pressure of a deadline, GAHAN wrote and produced all the songs in collaboration with Christian Eigner (drums) and Andrew Phillpott (guitars) of the Depeche Mode touring band. They worked at Gahan's 11th Floor Studios in his adopted hometown of NYC where he's lived for the past 10 years. Tony Hoffer, known for his work with Beck, Air, the Kooks and the Fratellis, has been tapped to mix the album in July.

Gahan says HOURGLASS is more electronic-sounding than Paper Monsters, "but we were very aware of the importance of keeping urgency in the sound and a feeling of spontaneity. We didn't want to get bogged down in trying to make everything sound perfect. You want to keep the rough edges."

Gahan adds: "Christian plays drums and Andrew can easily find his way around bass and guitar - and then we're basically cutting all this stuff up and fucking with it by using ProTools, effects and all kinds of stuff. Accidents do happen, and they're good."

Should be good. The songs on Playing the Angel were definitely a step up from the first solo album, which I like well enough but mostly for the atmospherics.

Hopefully there will be less guitars than on his debut. Was a bit too "Songs Of Faith And Devotion" for my taste.

i never actually heard "paper monsters". i liked the idea of it. this too.

I have been listening to Hourglass nonstop for the past 96 hours. It's fucking incredible.

:-D

I've been meaning to say more about this album. Picked it up last week after being slack on it and goddamn if it isn't a jawdropper.

Among other things, it is clearly NOT a Depeche-minus-Martin style album, for all that he's working with Christian Eigner et al. Fantastic singing, INSANELY good rhythms. It's almost like he decided ten years on from Ultra to give his own spin on it without replicating it.

I kind of don't give a shit how many "lol Dan is a reactionary old goth who doesn't understand music after 1985" bullshit posts this generates when I'm enjoying an album this much.

I don't really pin it back to Ultra; the whole vibe seems very informed by Playing the Angel to me, especially the songs Dave wrote for that album ("I Want It All" and "Nothing's Impossible" in particular).

Something about the heaviness of much of the album made me think of Ultra, but you're right about the songwriting style being much more in line with those newer songs (something like "Miracles" could have never fit on Ultra, f'r instance)

I broke down and got this from iTunes, mostly because the iTunesPlus version added three bonus remixes onto the end of the album.

"Kingdom" fucking stomps my face off.

mostly because the iTunesPlus version added three bonus remixes onto the end of the album

Nice. I'll have to look for those.

You couldn't buy them seperately; probably someone has already burnripped them and has them out floating in the ether.

Not DIRECTLY Mr. Gahan but even so:

---

Mirror is an album of cinematic, electronic pop music from Thomas Anselmi's multi-media project of the same name produced by Vincent Jones and featuring performances by a star-studded cast of collaborators including Depeche Mode singer Dave Gahan, Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro, Bowie pianist Mike Garson, and introducing chanteuse Laure-Elaine and teen actress Frances Lawson.

First launched at the New Forms Festival three years ago, the aesthetic of the Mirror song and video cycle is deeply rooted in the sounds and sights of erotic art and cinema. One can hear in the music the influence of film composers such as Francis Lai (Love Story, Bilitis) and Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet). The songs functioned as the soundtrack to immersive multi-performer shows that combine electronic pop music with theatricality and live video production.

The use of video in its stage presentation is both strange and familiar, playing on our nostalgia for the iconic imagery of classic Hollywood and the stagey drama of television variety shows. A new direction for the pop spectacle, Mirror uses live and recorded media to create a kind of pyschosexual postmodern cabaret. By embracing the artificial and sentimental, Mirror reflects the transitory, spectacular world of endless commodities, sex, advertising, and tabloid violence. Ballads of love and longing disguise the themes of cultural decay and apocalypse.

Mirror 's creator Tom Anselmi has spent a lifetime assembling a brilliant and dangerous past, and with Mirror takes an assured step into his future. At 17, Anselmi was the frontman, lyricist and designated sacrifice on the rock and roll altar with the band Slow. Built on primal teenage confusion, brilliant songwriting and crushing musicianship, Slow swept across North American stages like a three-chord typhoon leaving a trail of blood, sweat, broken gear and slack-jawed,

exhausted audiences in its wake. Slow was an incitement, a palpable threat and a dance on the edge of madness and as, such, designed to implode. After a performance at Expo 86 which featured the expected savagery and some unexpected frontal nudity, the performance climaxed with sirens, uniforms and legal threats while the band fled the exhibition grounds. Shortly thereafter, their work done, Slow disbanded.
Two years later Anselmi led Copyright through three acclaimed albums and a dispiriting journey through the corporate wilderness. Subjects of a bidding war among major labels, Anselmi chose a Los Angeles industry showcase to vent his disgust with the industry and himself in an onstage drugs-and-drink exorcism that left label heads white-faced and terrified. It was, as witnesses later testified, "a little too real for most people."

Cut to: a familiar scenario - addiction, dissipation, squandered time and talent, and, beloved of Hollywood, the happy ending. Anselmi kicked his habit, regained his muse and set back to work older, wiser, sadder and a mature artist ready to create major work. That work is Mirror .

Anselmi says: "Being in a band I became very frustrated with the performance limitations of having 4 men on stage. The singer tells their story, so they can only tell a little girls' story in the 3rd person. This was the genius of Serge (Gainsbourg). He used singers in a more iconic cinematic way. So Combining that with David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti's ironic use of saccharine pop music, I started to think of a formula for the Mirror record and a kind of cinemagraphic concert. I also obviously stole a lot from Brecht and Weill, like everyone else."

The result is akin to a telethon for weltschmertz, a word first used to describe the disorientation of returning German soldiers in WWI who had seen and endured too much at too young an age. In Anselmi's creation the characters are shell-shocked by sex and the discovery that youth and beauty are transitory. For reference, consider Oscar Levant's summation of Hollywood, a place where "sincerity is the most important thing, and once you can fake that, you've got it made."

http://www.mirror.fm/
http://www.myspace.com/mirrorav

enjoying the first recoil ep today. it's little more than a nurse with wound album made up of depeche mode samples, but it's really nice as a collage of all those amazing depeche synth noises pre-black celebration, with added emulator grain. the second half of "2" gets into a really hypnotic groove

couple of kraftwerk samples in there also

Never did properly talk about the Soulsavers albums Dave's been doing -- the first one was pretty nice (makes total sense he got into them via their work with Mark Lanegan beforehand), but the new one about out in a few weeks is really lovely.

All this by way of leading into the fact that I ended up interviewing Dave this morning by phone. THAT'S something I never thought I'd be lucky enough to do. It'll run in a few weeks in the Quietus.

btw I am playing "Kingdom" on repeat right now

as someone who loves the whole sonic groove of the soulsavers, the continuation of this collaboration pleases me immensely.

(the album will probably suit the onset of autumn rather well i suspect)

It very much is coming out the right time of year!

Okay, album out imminently, and here's my interview:

http://thequietus.com/articles/19076-interview-dave-gahan

Cheers, Ned. I've been listening to a fair bit of Recoil today, think I'm going to put Hourglass on now!

yeah, cracking stuff ned.

Thanks!

(and just how would the 17 year old ned have reacted if someone had told him that in a few years time he would be chatting to DG and MG ?!)

Well, given that it would be over half my lifetime from that point forward, hard to say 'a few years'...

ok, so the reviews are in, and i think its safe to say they are fair to middling.

having ordered it from amazon earlier, and using the RIP function, i have now heard it a few times.
clearly there is a massive disconnect between what certain people are expecting from a DG solo album and this.
the fact is, this is a soulsavers/DG collaboration.
and, as a soulsavers fan for years, this album totally fits in with their groove and sound.
yes, all the usual cliches are there both sonically and lyrically, but i care not.
it's everything i want from a soulsavers album, and the fact that DG is involved with his vocal intensity is the icing on the cake.

tldr : fuck the negative reviews, this album is ace.

I just replayed the first SS/DG album since this was announced and it makes a lot more sense to me than it did the first time I tried to play it

if you see this collab as a "SS/DG" groove then it fits in perfectly,
as SS have been doing this thing for years (hurray - yes yes, i love it).
however, if you see it as a "DG + Extras" project,
then it's not going to tick your boxes as it is a very singular listen.

I haven't got around to listening to this, but it's definitely on my mental list of things to listen to.

Christ, the album artwork though!

Party time!

https://eu.rymimg.com/lk/o/l/1f52bfdc9b4b10d90585590c76f559f7/5828601.jpg

someone on facebook made a soulsavers version of it which i though was very appropiate.

this album gets better : wine + dark nights = perfection

Unsound Methods and Liquid both seriously doing it for me today... I can't for the life of me figure out why these albums didn't take off, I would have thought they'd have a huge appeal for fans of, say, Massive Attack or something.

New covers album, Imposter, out Nov. 12.

01 The Dark End of the Street (Chips Moman/Dan Penn)
02 Strange Religion (Mark Lanegan)
03 Lilac Wine (James Shelton)
04 I Held My Baby Last Night (Jules Bihari/Elmore James)
05 A Man Needs a Maid (Neil Young)
06 Metal Heart (Cat Power)
07 Shut Me Down (Rowland S. Howard)
08 Where My Love Lies Asleep (Gene Clark)
09 Smile (Charlie Chaplin, John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons)
10 The Desperate Kingdom of Love (PJ Harvey)
11 Not Dark Yet (Bob Dylan)
12 Always on My Mind (John Lee Christopher, Jr., Mark James & Wayne Thompson)

Metal Heart seems like it doesn’t fit his style at all, but very curious to hear it.

I would have only been surprised if he didn’t include a Lanegan cover.

indeed - especially given that Soulsavers have already worked a lot with Mark.

07 Shut Me Down (Rowland S. Howard)

intrigued to hear his take on this.