I'm sure over on my main blog, Los Angelista, everybody is totally sick of me talking about Depeche Mode.
It's only going to get worse as the days go by because we only have two weeks left till their new record, Sounds of the Universe (A/K/A SOTU) comes out. I am totally on the verge of losing my mind!
And so, lo and behold, I was wandering around on the Amazon site on Monday night and came across a little promo video snippet with the song "Peace". (Spoiler alert: if you don't want to hear the song, don't click "play").
I'll confess, when I first heard this song, I thought it was a little on the old-school cheese side of things, but I can NOT stop listening to it. It's old school done right and damn, the beat has got some bounce. Seriously, you can do all those dirty south bounce kind of dances to it. Trust me, I've tried!
How many times can I listen on repeat in a row???
I know, it's been awhile. But no worries, I haven't stopped listening to music and my love for Depeche Mode hasn't died.
It's a long night tonight. I feel slightly heartbroken for more reasons than can be named. So, I'm listening to "Surrender" by Depeche Mode. It's a b-side to the 1998 single release of "Only When I Lose Myself" and it feels quite appropriate for today's mood.
I've been listening to my vinyl of Depeche Mode's 1986 album, Black Celebration quite a bit lately and I keep replaying the song "Fly on the Windscreen". The song was originally the B-side to the 1985 track, "It's Called a Heart". It wasn't considered single material because any song that starts out by saying, "Death is everywhere" is surely destined to be controversial. Unexpectedly, the song became an instant depress-o-matic classic. Mode fans went wild over it. So, "Fly on the Windscreen" got remixed and put on 1986's Black Celebration album, cementing the dark vibe of the rest of the record.
Yes they are indeed singing about there being lambs for the slaughter and all that but then the chorus kicks in:
"Come here
Touch me
Kiss me
Touch me
Now"
How could you resist such directness? Yes, death is always lurking right around the corner in this world of ours, so we've got to take every moment, seize it to live and love. The song reminds me to live life and appreciate what's going on my life now because it could be all over in a heartbeat.
Plus, the musical arrangement and lyrics still sounds fresh, like the kind of song that could get played on an NPR station at night. Here's a "video" of it so you can hear it if you haven't before. It's not, of course, an official video but one that some fans made up. Enjoy.
It's Depeche Mode Monday and the 1986 single, "A Question of Lust" has been stuck in my head for the past week. I was only 14 when this song was released and I never once heard it played on the radio. Instead, this is one of the Depeche Mode tunes that I discovered many many years after its release. Despite the title, it's not a song that's about sex. It's about relationships and the mistakes you make in them.
This is also the second song Depeche Mode released where the lead is sung by Martin Gore instead of lead singer, Dave Gahan. I always think Martin's voice sounds like an angel. Check it out for yourself:
I listen to Depeche Mode more than any other artist. I could turn this whole blog into a blog solely about what Depeche Mode records I'm listening to on any given day. Instead, I've decided I'm going to start a weekly feature called "Depeche Mode Monday".
Every Monday I'm going to share the Mode song I've been rocking the most over the past week. To kick things off in grand style, I figured I'd start you all off with 1987's Strangelove. This song is such a Mode classic and, 21 years later, remains in my top five favorite Mode songs. Plus, I wanted to be one of the girls in the video!
Music for the Masses, Depeche Mode's sixth studio album, might be my favorite Mode album of all time. It's hard to choose one, but MFTM just might get the nod. And besides, I have four copies of it.
It was released in the fall of 1987, one month into my sophomore year of high school. I can remember huddling under my blankets listening to a bootleg Maxell cassette tape recording of it.
Sometimes things happened in my life that made me listen to one particular song more than another. And that winter of 1987, I had "The Things You Said" constantly playing in my dark bedroom at night.
The song begins with Mode's singer/songwriter Martin Gore singing, "I heard it from my friends about the things you said."
And my goodness did the tears run down my cheeks when I'd hear that line. High school girls can be cruel, mean even. One minute they're your friend and the next, they're stabbing you in the back and gossiping about you.
What gets less attention is that high school boys do the same things. That winter, I turned down the advances of a boy. He was a senior and very good looking. I really liked him but he'd made it clear he wanted to sleep with me. And I did not want to sleep with him, even when he'd tell me all the typical things high school boys say to try to get you to feel sorry for them.
And so, to save his reputation, and, I think, to get back at me, he went and told lots of people that he'd slept with me. I was shocked and absolutely outraged. So when Martin sang:
"I get so carried away
You brought me down to earth
I thought we had something special
Now I know what it's worth"
I could feel those words completely.
Looking back, I think I was even more upset that some of the girls who were supposed to be my friends believed him and not me and chose to spread the rumor behind my back.
I never forgot that experience, never forgot what it was like to have someone say something about me that wasn't true.
And today, when I least expected it, that memory comes creeping back into my present, and I remember the song:
Some people don't like their favorite musical artists to change.
Some people want artists to stay the same. Sameness, as in wear the same clothes, have the same hair, have the same musical sound over and over again. Year after year. Forever and ever till death do them part. After all, it's comfortable.
To me, that's pretty boring. That's why I'm so thrilled that Davey Havok and Jade Puget from AFI have gone ahead and worked the goth-electro-industrial thing through their new side project, Blaqk Audio.
With lyrics like, "How it breaks their hearts, that we made an art of desecrating our sanctuaries," their first single, "Stiff Kittens" channels some mid to late 80's Depeche Mode and New Order. In my world, that's an infinitely good thing.
This isn't an official video, but here's the very danceable song. Enjoy: