Richard Spencer and Andrew Jensen review Depeche Mode’s 14th studio album, Spirit (2016). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| What do you want to say about this album? | |
| Not too many good things. | |
| Really? | |
| Yeah, I noticed that when you were asking me to rank the albums, and I struggled a little bit with Speak and Spell because I feel like... | |
| Even if it might be the worst on some artistic level, it's so indispensable that it's almost the best, arguably. | |
| You can't think about Depeche Mode without that album. | |
| I think you can think about Depeche Mode Without Spirit. | |
| We're going backwards. | |
| Ignoring the realities. | |
| Going backwards. | |
| Are you counting all the casualties? | |
| Jesus. | |
| Yeah, so I listened to this album in full start to finish, probably when I started to get into Depeche Mode. | |
| 2018, 19-ish. | |
| But I remember a 2017 Michael Malice tweet. | |
| It was actually in response to your controversy with the band. | |
| But he said in the tweet something like, Depeche Mode sucks, but you just can't get enough. | |
| Fast forward about... | |
| Two or three years after I had really just sat down and listened to this album. | |
| And I'm kind of just bored by the album. | |
| And even when the lyrics struck my brain more than my heart or gut, the music wasn't there to compliment it. | |
| I mean, I'm glad there was no nostalgia on the album. | |
| Depeche Mode's not a band like that that's going to mimic their 1983 or 4 or 5 sound or anything. | |
| But I don't know. | |
| I think it comes down to the production. | |
| And listening to this album, I've listened to this album probably five times in two or three weeks. | |
| And there's not one... | |
| That strikes me. | |
| And the more I listen to it, I think the less I like it. | |
| I mean, there's a couple. | |
| Wow. | |
| But, yeah, which is the exact opposite of my Depeche Mode experiences. | |
| I mean, the more I listen to it. | |
| It's kind of your, yeah, it's the opposite of how you feel about a lot of things. | |
| Some even films have gotten better as I've gotten older and I've rewatched. | |
| In albums as well. | |
| Speak and Spell, for example. | |
| Okay, let's go backwards. | |
| So maybe the crazy controversy might actually be a good place to start. | |
| I'm not surprised that Michael Malice dislikes Depeche Mode. | |
| I would be concerned if he actually liked Depeche Mode. | |
| But this was... | |
| Going back to a time when it's fair to say that the media was hanging on my every word. | |
| Because I actually didn't mean to create a controversy or have a response or anything like that. | |
| Obviously, I have been a Depeche Mode fan since the mid-80s. | |
| I mentioned the story a couple of weeks ago about... | |
| I was overhearing a vinyl recording. | |
| I think it's what it was, a vinyl recording of either some great reward or black celebration in my sister's room through the door. | |
| And I just knew that I had found my band. | |
| And it's weird. | |
| This has stuck with me in the way that other things haven't. | |
| But anyway, I was a massive fan. | |
| I do agree with many of my off-the-cuff comments. | |
| Not all of my comments were actually taken into account. | |
| I'll actually look up what I wrote to Sarah Posner many, many years ago. | |
| I'll try to go way back in time here. | |
| February 2017. | |
| I was going to ask what the context was because it was CPAC, right? | |
| Yes, it was. | |
| Let me go through All of this, because there's a lot here. | |
| So, I had a very long conversation with Sarah Posner about Depeche Mode. | |
| She's, I think, older or around the same age, and she was very interested in it, and she kind of was, in a way, scandalized by what I was saying. | |
| So, I walked into CPAC. | |
| And these controversies have now happened again with Laura Loomer or Nick Fuentes, but they were definitely happening with me at the time. | |
| And I was first welcomed. | |
| They were actually talking about how some journalists had called up CPAC almost as like their... | |
| Job is hall monitor. | |
| And they were like, that's fine. | |
| He's not doing anything. | |
| And so, yeah, I was there at CPAC. | |
| I was planning on asking a question or anything. | |
| There were no questions to be asked. | |
| And then one journalist came up and then more did. | |
| And it just became a kind of scrum. | |
| And it just overwhelmed CPAC. | |
| So I was standing there and I was surrounded by like 30 or 40 journalists and then onlookers. | |
| And, you know. | |
| It is a private gathering. | |
| I didn't really want to... | |
| Cause a riot or anything. | |
| But that in itself became its own story. | |
| But I remember I was just talking with people and was just going off the cuff. | |
| And I forgot how it came up. | |
| But someone was made... | |
| I think at one point someone was asking me if I liked New Order. | |
| And I was like, well, Depeche Mode is the official band of the alt-right. | |
| And one journalist tweeted that out. | |
| And then by the time I had left CPAC, there was already a statement by Depeche Mode's publicist, you know, denouncing racism, you know, all this kind of stuff. | |
| Yeah, it was pretty remarkable. | |
| It happened that fast. | |
| Of course, that's the age of social media where that publicist might very well have just been on Twitter and seen it and got, you know, someone sent it to him. | |
| Maybe it wasn't 15 minutes, but within two or three hours. | |
| And I wrote this to Sarah Posner, and she didn't repeat everything I said, but I'll just go back in time. | |
| These are text messages. | |
| I said, no, tongue was firmly planted in cheek when she was saying they've come out publicly against Trump. | |
| Depeche Mode. | |
| I said, first, the long-time Depeche Mode fan. | |
| Second, there's always been a certain nostalgic synthwave vibe to the alt-right in terms of aesthetics. | |
| And she said, nostalgic synthwave vibe. | |
| Why does the alt-right have that aesthetic? | |
| I don't think I answered that question. | |
| Why do you think it did have that aesthetic? | |
| Because Depeche Mode, look, they've been going for three decades since the 1980s. | |
| If you ask a casual music fan, they would probably think about Enjoy the Silence maybe, but Just Can't Get Enough, 80s band, etc. | |
| But the question I guess I didn't fully answer is like, why? | |
| Oh, here, I did answer it. | |
| Excuse me. | |
| It's a good question. | |
| It might have something to do with generations. | |
| Perhaps my age are grasping for our childhoods. | |
| Younger kids are grasping for an imaginary childhood. | |
| There's something in ease about Trump, too. | |
| That's clearly the decade that defined him, much like Depeche Mode. | |
| Might have been the last moment that there was a recognizable white America, or in the case of DM, white Britain. | |
| I was going deep history here. | |
| I've never been there, but it's a kind of post-industrial, cultureless, soulless suburb. | |
| You can see some of that in the aesthetic, Spartan quality of their music. | |
| They were also grasping for something else. | |
| The fact that Diem or Tepeche Mode was always most popular in Central Europe, the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union is interesting in that regard. | |
| Diem was bigger in East Germany than in England. | |
| True. | |
| I think that's all interesting, and it actually gels with what we've been talking about over these past two podcasts. | |
| In terms of the Trump thing and the synth wave or fash wave or vapor wave or whatever it's called, I think all of those are accurate points. | |
| There was actually an artist, what was his name? | |
| Zurious? | |
| Yeah, Zurious. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And he would do a title like The Great Replacement or Brexit. | |
| You know, traitors will be punished or something. | |
| You know, something a little hardcore. | |
| And it's just great stuff. | |
| Sleeping Saxon or something like that. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Sleeping Saxon, Awakenings. | |
| Yeah, great stuff. | |
| And cool. | |
| I mean, a bit generic, I guess, in terms of dance music, but very, very good. | |
| And he jumped on that wave. | |
| And there is... | |
| I do think all of those things... | |
| I was old for the alt-right. | |
| I was looking back to the 80s as my childhood. | |
| So much of politics in general is nostalgia. | |
| I think there is a bit of nostalgia to fascism, whether it's a nostalgia for a lost past or the time before the war or ancient Rome or something. | |
| There's clearly a nostalgic quality to it. | |
| I think with Zoomers, I do think the 80s Was this childhood they never had in a very different way than, say, my generation looked at the 60s? | |
| Because the 60s, you know, I guess it was cool, revolutionary, famous rock bands and music and crazy politics and assassinations of political candidates, etc. | |
| But it was old. | |
| I mean, I don't think we looked back on it and kind of wished we could have been there. | |
| Maybe some did, not myself. | |
| We definitely weren't listening to the Beatles. | |
| You know, you could like the Beatles. | |
| That's cool. | |
| The Stones, if you like the Stones, that's cool. | |
| But that wasn't a band that was important to you. | |
| But I think we're, again, as I'm sure we talked about, I mean, things have just been so fragmented with the current music industry, with... | |
| Playlist on Spotify being your music. | |
| So you're listening to 90s music or what have you. | |
| You're not listening to something that's just been released that's kind of speaking to you right now. | |
| You're kind of curating your own world. | |
| So we're in a different space than I was back in, say, the 80s or 90s. | |
| I think there's a lot of Zoomers that probably looked at the 80s as this childhood they never had. | |
| It's like everyone was successful and every woman was hot and every man dressed like they were a cast member of Miami Vice and doing coke and Trump was building towers. | |
| I mean, it's just that type of fantasy really got at the alt-right of that period. | |
| I mean, even Muse, which is an interesting band, clearly influenced by Depeche Mode, not as great or as original or as unique as Depeche Mode, but I like Muse quite a bit. | |
| Even Muse was trying to evoke that in a lot of their albums. | |
| They're trying to evoke the alt-right. | |
| In general, I think there was a line from Thought Contagion about no time for a revolution. | |
| Brace yourself for the final solution. | |
| It seemed to be an alt-right tweet of some kind. | |
| I don't know. | |
| *music* | |
| It's a good album. | |
| I like Muse. | |
| Again, Muse is kind of a derivative band. | |
| A derivative of Radiohead and DM and a lot of other things. | |
| But whatever. | |
| They're good. | |
| So I think there was that quality, that back-to-the-80s quality to the 2016 Trump movement. | |
| Now, I would say that that is now totally gone. | |
| I don't think that that characterizes the current alt-right or the dissident right or whatever. | |
| I don't think that characterizes Trump. | |
| I think a lot of other things, including religious fundamentalism, now predominate. | |
| But whatever. | |
| It was a particular... | |
| I think they've also been some quotes of mine of like there's a there's a fascist quality to it and I got at this. | |
| Third, Diem is interesting. | |
| So this is me writing in early 2017. | |
| Diem is interesting in the sense that they aren't a typical rock band in terms of lyric and much else. | |
| Diem is a band of existential angst, pain, sadism, horror, darkness, and much more. | |
| It's not bubblegum pop with front men who sing about love and sugarplum fairies. | |
| There was a certain communist aesthetic to their early album, A Broken Frame, as well as titles like Music for the Masses. | |
| And again, they were popular in the Eastern Bloc. | |
| But then there's a bit of a fascist element, too. | |
| It's obviously ambiguous. | |
| And as with all art, everything is multi-layered, contradictory, and ambivalent. | |
| Their latest single is representative of this. | |
| It can be read in multiple different ways. | |
| Now, I was referring to Where's the Revolution, which we could jump into. | |
| I do think that that's true. | |
| I mean, A Broken Frame, which I will cover in our next episode, one of the greatest album artworks ever created and clearly evoking communism. | |
| Yeah. | |
| With a woman with a sickle. | |
| I mean, it's beautiful in itself, but... | |
| It's, you know, what was it, 1982 or whatever? | |
| I mean, yeah, it is definitely evoking the Cold War. | |
| And so they could do that. | |
| I think there's a kind of fascist aesthetic to music for the masses, the, you know, big red speaker. | |
| I've even heard there was, with like Pimp and a couple of other... | |
| There was some kind of evocation of the Hitler Youth, although I would say aesthetically and not ideologically. | |
| And I'm not just saying that to make excuses. | |
| I think that's true. | |
| There was just a, you know, punk rock evoked Nazism. | |
| There was a, for various reasons, probably to shove it up the ass of the upper class or whatever. | |
| Mostly. | |
| But there's some kind of evocation of danger and hardness and toughness and also an assertion of the mass production quality of it all. | |
| I mean, Depeche Mode is a technological band. | |
| They're sampling, they're using only synthesizers, etc. | |
| You know, it's vague and ambiguous. | |
| And I think that was quoted from Sarah Posner of like, there's an ambiguity to, but there's a fascist element. | |
| And I'm sure some people would laugh at that or say that I'm projecting or, you know, Depeche Mode, they hate Trump. | |
| What are you saying? | |
| And it's like, yeah, but I'm right. | |
| And I don't care. | |
| Like, I denounce Trump too. | |
| So what's your point? | |
| You know, like... | |
| In terms of day-to-day politics, what's your point? | |
| There's some things that are bigger than just some candidate. | |
| So anyway, that was the time. | |
| And I remember later on, they were interviewed in, I think, by some Scandinavian network. | |
| And Dave Gahan called me a cunt of all things. | |
| But now that word has a different connotation in Britain. | |
| Although he's an American pretty much at this point. | |
| So maybe anyway, he was... | |
| Digging deep for that insult. | |
| But then he was like, but you have to understand he's a very intelligent and educated and dangerous cunt. | |
| Going a little more political is also a risk. | |
| I mean, the thing is that you've had recently, you've had a fan that You didn't appreciate the leader of the alt-right, American alt-right. | |
| And he claimed that you were his number one, their number one band, in a way. | |
| What was your immediate reaction to that news? | |
| I can't say it on TV, can I? | |
| It started with C and ended with T. And it's an English very short word. | |
| OK, so I take it you didn't appreciate it? | |
| Look, this is a dangerous guy. | |
| He's like, you know, he's highly educated, you know... | |
| Richard Spencer. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't say his name really, but... | |
| He's not here to defend himself, I should say that. | |
| You know, they're the most dangerous kind of, like, idiots, aren't they? | |
| People actually listen to them. | |
| Anyway... | |
| LAUGHTER I've been asked about this later on, and they're like, oh, are you so devastated? | |
| And it's like, look, I'm not. | |
| First off, they could call me Satan himself, and I would still like their music and appreciate them. | |
| It just doesn't change anything. | |
| Secondly, the insult was actually a little... | |
| Multi-layered and so on. | |
| But thirdly, I don't know. | |
| The whole thing is just kind of fun. | |
| Fun story from that time. | |
| But to go back to it, so I was referring to Where's the Revolution when I said their latest single could be read in a number of different ways. | |
| First off, before I jump into this, do you have any thoughts on this? | |
| Were you aware of this or did you have any thoughts on this? | |
| Yeah, let me back up just a hair. | |
| Okay, so I think you had asked earlier why you think the alt-right was synonymous with synthwave. | |
| I just think because synthwave, synthpop, it's just weird. | |
| It's weird music, and the alt-right was weird. | |
| 4chan is weird. | |
| Frogs and shit like that on Twitter are weird. | |
| There's no getting around that. | |
| And also synthpop itself is... | |
| I don't mean to get too esoteric here. | |
| or kind of engage in I see Jesus and sort of exit Jesus. | |
| But I think a lot of Martin's core What do you mean by that? | |
| Go into that a little bit. | |
| Sure. | |
| Okay, so if I think of blues... | |
| I think of either minor or major blues. | |
| It's the flatted third, fifth, or seventh. | |
| And you can hear that. | |
| I'm trying to think of a good blues song. | |
| I don't really listen to that much blues, but anything by Chuck Berry, any of these, Led Zeppelin, you can hear a lot of those. | |
| It's kind of like swampy. | |
| It's usually accompanied by a triplet rhythm. | |
| And I think Martin's... | |
| Chord progressions, a lot of them, especially when they use that one minor to the third minor, whether it's a major or minor third. | |
| For example, going from A minor to C minor or A minor to C sharp minor, because he'll do stuff like that a lot. | |
| I think that is very dissonant. | |
| It was certainly playing in a different key politically. | |
| I mean, I'm not saying, oh, Depeche Mode only employs white chords, because they do have a lot of blues influences. | |
| But even their blues influences don't, until relatively recently, I think until about 10 years ago with Delta Machine. | |
| If you take a song, for example, like Day Tripper by The Beatles, that uses... | |
| That is a... | |
| That's a completely blues melody because it goes E to G to G sharp. | |
| Playing with that flatted third, for example, the flatted and the major third, that's a common blues technique. | |
| You see that a lot. | |
| Obviously, there's a dominant seventh, that flatted seventh. | |
| But I think that Depeche Mode generally stays away from that. | |
| It's very minor. | |
| And minor chords evoke a seriousness and especially... | |
| A lot of Martin songs invoke inwardness. | |
| In other words, the lyrics sound like the music. | |
| Is that clear? | |
| Yeah, keep going. | |
| I like what you're saying. | |
| You mentioned Gen Xers and Zoomers looking at Gen Xer childhoods growing up in the 80s and such. | |
| I think there's a bit of truth to that, because speaking as a millennial, my music was kind of, right out of high school, was kind of informed by the boomers. | |
| And I think the millennials, in a lot of ways, they have a lot of boomer qualities. | |
| I mean, we are a generation of spoiled brats. | |
| And I think where the Zoomer and Xer kind of connection is, just to be very general about it, there's kind of an apathy to both. | |
| I mean, I think a lot of Zoomers... | |
| I think also kind of cynical and negative and almost nihilistic. | |
| I would say that millennials and boomers do have a weird connection to themselves. | |
| To each other, rather. | |
| Yeah, father and son, definitely. | |
| I mean, my parents are boomers, but I'm a young Gen Xer, born in 1978, but almost a millennial, but I identify as Gen X. But yeah, more cynical. | |
| There is something, you know, if we look at Zoomers right now as just kind of... | |
| Desperate and depressed and sexless and on the internet and nihilistic and communist or Nazis or whatever. | |
| That's probably not how I would describe millennials. | |
| They seem to be naive and happy. | |
| Their greatest political thinker is someone like Matthew Iglesias or something. | |
| And the films that they responded to and that are... | |
| Very meaningful to them and that they love are like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. | |
| There's just something I have to say really contemptible about them. | |
| I agree. | |
| I'm a self-hating millennial. | |
| That's okay. | |
| Not you personally. | |
| And you can make fun of Gen Xers all you want. | |
| But we did actually have some cool music. | |
| Kurt Cobain committed suicide. | |
| He's our Jesus, I guess, although there's no redemption with this Messiah. | |
| Michael Hutchins, too. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, multiple. | |
| But when you're negative, you're able to be insightful and critical, and you're unhappy and dissatisfied. | |
| I think there's some positive things to Gen X. Zoomers, I mean, I hope there can be some positive things. | |
| But I do think Zoomers just do the nature of the world beyond their control. | |
| It's not their fault. | |
| They're pretty whacked out. | |
| But yeah, I don't know if the point was the kind of 80s as musical utopia that we went for at that moment. | |
| Yeah, I mean, just... | |
| Personally, if you go 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc., I think it was in a lot of ways due to the diversity. | |
| You could have so many different sounds and groups like metalheads, punks, new wavers, whatever. | |
| But the thing I was going to say about Depeche Mode's aesthetics is... | |
| I mean, their creative director, Martin Adkins, said, I don't want to sound like a neo-Nazi, but we used to admire the way that... | |
| It's just a great way to... | |
| It's always a good way to begin a sentence. | |
| I'm not racist, but... | |
| He said... | |
| That they admired the way that the Nazi flags would hang as big banners over the buildings in Germany. | |
| And that is pretty obviously... | |
| I mean, look at Black Celebration as a cover. | |
| There's a big banner over a big building. | |
| Yes, the building looks futuristic. | |
| No, there's no Nazi symbol. | |
| There are these kind of strange symbols. | |
| But, I mean, he basically... | |
| Kind of gave that away. | |
| And he also admitted, yeah, we're inspired by futurists, fascists, and communists, basically, as far as their artwork is concerned. | |
| Obviously, we can't say that ergo Depeche Mode is, you know, a Hitlerian or something. | |
| Presumably they kind of listened to what Martin was trying to write about at the time and applied their own ideas to that, which is why you get this kind of socialist look to that early artwork that goes around construction time again in the singles. | |
| The political look of the things was more fashion than specific statement. | |
| If you look back, you'll see a lot of those kind of elements creeping in, you know, of both fascist and communistic kind of iconography. | |
| You know, it was exciting-looking stuff. | |
| And I think that nobody had really plundered it to market an everyday product like a record. | |
| Depeche Mode are officially boomers. | |
| I mean, the baby boom itself was a long generation. | |
| But they spoke to Gen Xers, at least eventually, in terms of their fans. | |
| People were buying their albums. | |
| You know, I think this album itself is a kind of dark boomer-esque thing. | |
| Like, if there's a politics, it's dark boomerism. | |
| And it's very 2016. | |
| This is why I kind of like this album. | |
| I'll just throw something, like, Poor Man, I mean, granted, it's a pretty two-dimensional song. | |
| but it's much better than Richmond, north of Richmond. | |
| Hey, there's no news. | |
| Poor man's still got the blues. | |
| He's walking around in worn-out shoes with nothing to lose. | |
| Fail is just so nihilistic and dark and almost like teenage angsty that I like it. | |
| Poison Heart, etc. | |
| I think there's actually some really good, some good if not great tracks. | |
| And I think the first, it's actually the A side of the album, the first four songs, I think are... | |
| All interconnected, and I think purposefully so. | |
| And they are political. | |
| And what exactly the politics is, I think, is an interesting question. | |
| So let's go to going backwards. | |
| I think kind of obvious. | |
| I mean, at even one point... | |
| They say, we're going backwards to a caveman mentality. | |
| That's almost a little too on the nose. | |
| But you get what they're saying. | |
| To say caveman mentality, they almost sound like a, you know, I don't know, the Huffington Post circa 2014 or something. | |
| I understand what you're saying. | |
| We're armed with new technology, but we're going backwards in terms of our mentality. | |
| And we can track it all with satellites, see it all in plain sight, watch men die in real time. | |
| But we have nothing inside. | |
| We feel nothing inside. | |
| We can track it on the satellites. | |
| See it all in plain sight. | |
| Watch men die in real time. | |
| But we have nothing inside. | |
| We feel nothing inside. | |
| Oh, oh, oh, oh. | |
| My sense with this is that these were produced, recorded, let's say, 2016. | |
| They came out, I think, in the fall of 2016, and then they toured in 2017. | |
| I think this is something they've been thinking about for longer than that. | |
| It takes a little bit of time to write a song, or at least a good one, that's worthy of an album. | |
| And I get a very strong... | |
| Terror War vibe, actually. | |
| From those songs. | |
| We have satellites everywhere and we're drone striking someone. | |
| Or maybe even those images that were leaked by Julian Assange showing these machine gunning of various potential... | |
| terrorist Arabs with no remorse and so on. | |
| There was something cold and brutal, but also apathetic and clinical about it. | |
| And I... | |
| I think they might be kind of feeling the wave of Trump and seeing Trump as stupid or something. | |
| And in that sense, I think they had foresight. | |
| I think there's also something. | |
| It's a deeper commentary of the Bush era that really flowed into the Obama era. | |
| Obama increased drone strikes. | |
| Obama blew his wad in Libya and other things. | |
| It was certainly not as dramatic as the Bush era, but Obama was awarded the Peace Prize before he came into office as an end to... | |
| I think that they're getting at that aspect. | |
| They're getting at the fact that we're becoming more technological, more interconnected, more global, etc. | |
| Along with that, there's almost the kind of loss of those, I guess you could say, boomer ideals of democracy and humanism, etc. | |
| And we are becoming more caveman-like, as cringe as that sentiment is. | |
| It's rather true. | |
| Yeah, I think that actually that song is, I mean, from the lyrics, I was kind of getting like, David Skirbina, Ed Dutton combo, like they wrote the song together kind of vibes. | |
| I mean, David Skirbina in the sense that they're talking about, like, what are we doing with this technology? | |
| Like, we're not kind of meant for this. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I won't go so far as to say Luddite, but definitely it's a tech skeptic song. | |
| You know, technology has made communication. | |
| Much easier and much worse. | |
| I think most would agree with that. | |
| I think the watchmen die in real time, but we have nothing inside. | |
| We feel nothing inside. | |
| That gets at porn and violence that we see today with Hamas and Israel. | |
| It's kind of like Gore is asking, what is this good for? | |
| And there is an irony to that because this technology, or not this particular technology, but technology in general is how they became who they are. | |
| So it's kind of like coming full circle on them. | |
| But yeah, I think that it's a reactionary. | |
| I feel like you had said that about the last... | |
| Memento Mori. | |
| Maybe it's just burned into my head now, but I feel like a lot of these lyrics, they relate more with the disgruntled 2015-16 Trump voter than they do to your bi-coastal shitlib. | |
| I really don't think... | |
| Even talking about poor men, you could... | |
| Maybe you want to say that it's a communistic song or something. | |
| Corporations get the brakes or something. | |
| Yeah, that's a pretty off-the-shelf liberal opinion. | |
| Yeah, but there's nothing that a Trump voter wouldn't disagree with you on that. | |
| So I can't help but see... | |
| I almost feel like liberals were kind of hoodwinked by this album because it got many good reviews from liberals. | |
| Like, oh, this is such a great album. | |
| You know, I think mostly... | |
| Yeah, Rolling Stone liked it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But I think whether Martin knows it or not, I mean, he's... | |
| They're kind of... | |
| The small reactionary that lives inside him is kind of coming out. | |
| I mean, you've got to think about, too, that... | |
| Well, at this time, he would have been in his mid-50s, something like that, and he's like 63 now, or 2. Anyway, the point being that he's older, he's kind of like, can't keep up with the whippersnappers and their iPhones kind of thing. | |
| And I'm not saying that disparagingly. | |
| I think that's a serious thing to address. | |
| There is this kind of sense of beating down. | |
| I mean, I think there are multiple layers to it, and that's why it's good and it can kind of speak to you. | |
| I remember attending this concert in 2017, and they played Where's the Revolution? | |
| And the guy... | |
| I went with two friends. | |
| One of them said, wow, this is like an Antipas song or something. | |
| It's, where's the revolution? | |
| Come on, people, you're letting me down. | |
| Where's the revolution? | |
| Come on people, you're letting me down Where's the revolution? | |
| Come on people, you're letting me down But it's talking about the lack of revolution, and you're getting pissed on, you're getting stomped on, and nothing's happening. | |
| And granted, there is something self-righteous about, you know, you're letting me down or something. | |
| Sure. | |
| And I almost don't like that sentiment, and that almost is a kind of Huffington Post from that era sentiment. | |
| But I think it's also kind of like... | |
| All of it can be read in a number of different ways. | |
| I mean, you could imagine this as almost like the Trump voter. | |
| Like, the train is coming. | |
| The train is coming. | |
| Hey, I was going to say that. | |
| Get on board. | |
| Yeah, the engine's humming. | |
| Music The train is coming. | |
| Get on board. | |
| Get on board, get on board, get on board The engine's coming, the engine's coming So get on board, get on board, get on board The train is coming, the train is coming It was called the Trump Train. | |
| For kind of inexplicable reasons. | |
| I mean, it's just, you know, jump on the Trump train. | |
| It's like this moving thing beyond you that you're getting on. | |
| You're kind of losing your own personality in a way, or agency at least. | |
| You're jumping on this train that's moving, whether you like it or not. | |
| And I think that resonated maybe unintentionally, perhaps. | |
| Maybe intentionally, but it resonated with the Trump. | |
| But you've been pushed around. | |
| You've been lied to. | |
| You've been fed truths. | |
| Who's making your decision? | |
| You or your religion, your government, your countries, you patriotic junkies. | |
| All of those things kind of bite each way, and they're kind of contradictory. | |
| Like, are you trapped by your religion? | |
| Is it making your thought? | |
| Is it thinking your thoughts for you? | |
| Is your government? | |
| But you can kind of read it in different ways. | |
| But I think what he's getting at is like a general sentiment that there is no revolution. | |
| There's no real hope. | |
| But then there's this like the train is coming. | |
| Even the train evokes. | |
| I don't know, maybe even like Bolshevik revolution or something. | |
| Just something older, something from the 20th century. | |
| But it's coming. | |
| So there is a kind of hope there. | |
| But it's ultimately expressing this just lack of movement. | |
| I mean, this is what defined the Trump era. | |
| I mean, you know, Trump's rise in popularity coincided with the end of the terror war. | |
| Living standards flatlining, life expectancy declining, and fatalities due to drug use increasing. | |
| And that was drug use of the opioids, not cool 80s cocaine or even smoking weed, but stuff that is just allowing you to escape the pain and it's going to eventually kill you. | |
| Yeah, I mean, it was the Trump album. | |
| Yeah, I agree. | |
| The get on board, get on board gives me, it reminds me of My Cosmos is Mine when it goes to the no more, no more, not here. | |
| There's kind of a similarity there. | |
| But what's funny is that, you know, I've said this before, for Martin's songwriting, he's really good at ambiguity. | |
| Kind of know what it's about, but you don't. | |
| And he's not telling. | |
| But this, on my first interpretation of it, was like, okay, this is just basically a political, social conscious album. | |
| But there is still ambiguity because, as we've said, who is he talking about? | |
| Is he speaking for, he could be speaking for somebody in... | |
| In London or somebody in the north of England in a de-industrialized, you know, suburb or something like that. | |
| Or for an American in the Midwest or the South. | |
| The music video for this, which, you know, we can't put too much stock into it, sure. | |
| But I just think that aesthetically with the Karl Marx kind of thing, it was boomery. | |
| You know, to be honest, I don't think it was a very creative choice by Anton. | |
| But, you know, there still is a lot of inwardness, kind of self-flagellation that you get in a lot of, well, that you could interpret in a lot of Martin's songs. | |
| I think if you, the song, The Worst Crime, I mean, I can kind of take it in a number of different ways. | |
| I don't know what you think about it, but it sounds to me, It's about killing democracy or something, and I'm thinking Brexit, because they were pretty openly anti-Brexit, and obviously exoterically anti-Trump. | |
| But there is a little bit of... | |
| That might have inspired it, but I think it's deeper. | |
| There's a lynching in the square. | |
| It's about... | |
| I mean, I... | |
| I think it goes also to going backwards of the caveman mentality, which is a bit of a clanging lyric, but it is getting at what they're talking about. | |
| And it's this kind of collective discussion of committing these crimes. | |
| If we take it to the point where we are right now, and let's not even talk about The salacious, unbelievably violent and horrific crimes, the Hamas dead. | |
| I mean, they're in a different situation than the Israelis are. | |
| And I think in a way, less should be expected of them morally and politically. | |
| Sure. | |
| Israel has had a lot of time to deal with this issue. | |
| That is the apartheid state, the conflict, etc. | |
| They've had a long time to deal with it. | |
| They've been a very rich place as well. | |
| They're shutting off the water and blocking people in Gaza. | |
| They're bombing apartment buildings. | |
| I mean, they are about to do the kind of lynching, you know? | |
| In a small-town version of, you know, this guy, guilty or not, let's be judge and jury and destroy him. | |
| I mean, they're doing that right now. | |
| And it's like, it's about contemplating that collective act of... | |
| fury you could say or scapegoating or something like that there's a lynching in the square you will have to join us everyone's going to be there we're setting up the trust | |
| Oops. | |
| Once there were solutions Now we have no excuses They got lost in confusion So we're preparing the nooses And oh, | |
| we had so much time I think it fits well with the first four songs, which make up a little kind of, I don't know, opera or something. | |
| They make up four different perspectives on this issue of where they are right now, or where we are right now. | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah, I mean, the song kind of gave me... | |
| There's a line, it talks about apathetic hesitation. | |
| We're all charged with treason. | |
| It definitely gets to a collective guilt. | |
| Listen to this as well. | |
| Blame misinformation, misguided leaders, apathetic hesitation, uneducated readers. | |
| I like that funny line. | |
| For whatever reason, we now find ourselves in this. | |
| We are all charged with treason. | |
| There is no one left to hiss. | |
| So it's, it kind of, you can say this, like, to go back to where we are right now, yeah, of course, there's tons of misinformation and lies and fog of war stuff. | |
| But, you know, you're ultimately going to be guilty of doing this act. | |
| That is Israelis. | |
| You're ultimately going to be guilty of destroying Gaza. | |
| Like you're going to commit the worst crime. | |
| And yeah. | |
| I think that mentality is what I think it's about. | |
| And I think what we're seeing now resonates with it. | |
| But go on. | |
| I think I cut you off for you. | |
| I was just going to say, when I heard we're all charged with treason and this apathetic hesitation, it triggered a memory from a scene in Mississippi burning. | |
| Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe are these two FBI agents, and they go to this town in the South, and they were covering up the murder of three civil rights workers. | |
| And the mayor of the town hangs himself, and Gene Hackman says, well, why did he? | |
| He wasn't even guilty. | |
| Why did he hang himself? | |
| And I remember Willem Dafoe says, Anyone who sits idly by during all this is guilty. | |
| And that kind of, like, we don't sleep until all the evil in the world is gone. | |
| I just think I got, like, a Puritan kind of vibe from that, you know, just from the we're all charged with treason, apathetic hesitation. | |
| You know, I... | |
| And then Scum is about committing the worst crime. | |
| Because it's about dehumanizing the enemy. | |
| Hey scum, hey scum, what have you ever done for anyone? | |
| and then pull the trigger. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Hey, Scott. | |
| Hey, Scott. | |
| What have you ever done for anyone? | |
| Hey, Scott. | |
| Hey, Scott. | |
| What are you gonna do when you come across? | |
| You're calling and you're falling and there's nowhere left to run. | |
| And you're weeping, not sleeping, and you're begging for your gun. | |
| Pull my trigger. | |
| Pull my trigger. | |
| Basically, it's not a really pleasant song. | |
| It's not one that I would just go listen to for fun or something. | |
| Because it's not getting at pleasant stuff. | |
| It's trying to get at that mentality of... | |
| Scapegoating someone, destroying someone. | |
| And you have to turn him into scum and just pull the trigger. | |
| Yeah, I will say that is probably my least favorite track, Scum, on the album. | |
| Just because I'm trying not to dwell too much on the production and the sound, but I just don't think the production served the songs. | |
| But anyway, yeah, we can move on. | |
| I enjoyed... | |
| Maybe I'm skipping ahead here, but I think my favorite song is Cover Me, which Dave Gahn wrote. | |
| I think that is... | |
| And that was one of the singles. | |
| I love the ambient percussion with the snares that sound kind of spacey. | |
| I'm not sure exactly what it's about. | |
| I was kind of getting Pink Floyd vibes from the atmosphere. | |
| You kind of get this kind of lap guitar. | |
| You know, and very echoey and a lot of delay and reverb on it, which I appreciate just from a production aspect. | |
| I dreamt of us in another life. | |
| One we've never reached. | |
| One we've never reached. | |
| It was more listenable, I think, than the other songs. | |
| It wasn't anything too astounding lyrically, but I think that maybe that's why this album in general had to capture me musically first, and I don't think it really did. | |
| I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. | |
| Yeah, I liked that one as well. | |
| A lot of the songs kind of roll into one another. | |
| I mean, I kind of get the hate for this album, and I like Memento Mori more. | |
| It's overall just a better album. | |
| More interesting. | |
| It's like I would want to return to it. | |
| But I guess I would defend this album. | |
| Maybe in some ways due to my little personal history with it. | |
| But I like it. | |
| I think it's cool. | |
| I think it's getting at interesting sentiments. | |
| And, you know, Where's the Revolution? | |
| Not one of their greatest anthem singles, but it's up there. | |
| You know? | |
| I think it's still performed. | |
| I think they're performing it. | |
| Live this year, aren't they? | |
| I was actually going to mention that they're not... | |
| Oh, okay, interesting. | |
| What was the set list that you saw? | |
| Because I didn't see their first leg of their tour. | |
| It was... | |
| I mean, if you want, I can run through them all real quick. | |
| My Cosmos is mine. | |
| Wagging tongue. | |
| Walking in my shoes. | |
| It's no good. | |
| Sister of Night. | |
| I was kind of surprised by that one. | |
| In your room, everything counts. | |
| Precious. | |
| Speak to me. | |
| A question of lust. | |
| Soul with me. | |
| Ghosts again. | |
| I feel you. | |
| A pain that I'm used to. | |
| World in my eyes. | |
| Wrong, which was probably my least favorite that was played. | |
| Stripped. | |
| John the Revelator. | |
| Enjoy the silence. | |
| And the encore was Waiting for the Night, which was beautiful. | |
| Just Can't Get Enough, Never Let Me Down, and they ended it with Personal Jesus. | |
| But not a single spirit song, and I think that's kind of telling. | |
| Also, I want to say about... | |
| Have they ever performed an Exciter song outside of the Exciter tour? | |
| So that sounds like your least favorite album. | |
| It was. | |
| I'm kind of ready to revisit it, though. | |
| But it was the one where I was like, oh, everyone has a bad album. | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, there is no... | |
| No, there is no Exciter song on their most recent tour. | |
| But another thing, just speaking of them playing live, I don't know how you feel about... | |
| Christian Eigner, the drummer that plays with them live. | |
| He's helped Dave write a few songs, including the one on here, Poison Heart. | |
| I thought he was totally overplaying. | |
| Really, since he took over in 1998 for the live performances, I thought... | |
| This is an electronic band. | |
| Yes, drums are suited for some of the songs, especially the kind of later ones. | |
| Yeah, call me an Alan fanboy, but Alan's drumming, though he's not a trained drummer in the same way that Aigner is. | |
| It was just better. | |
| It suited the mood better, and it wasn't overplayed. | |
| But I don't know how you feel about them live. | |
| I think they're great. | |
| I think they're one of the best bands I've ever seen live, if not the best. | |
| I just thought, and he did not. | |
| I want to mention that Eigner did not overplay. | |
| So they've been listening to my prayers or reading my mind or something because Eigner did not really overplay in this last concert that I saw. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's interesting. | |
| He might have gotten some notes. | |
| You weren't the only one who thought that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| There's another guy I remember, because I've been to a number of their tours since, I guess, Sound of the Universe as well. | |
| I mean, there's a guy who looks like he has, I don't know, an Arabian or Persian background. | |
| He's playing synth. | |
| Peter Lordino? | |
| That might be him, yeah. | |
| I guess he's Italian. | |
| I'm assuming, yeah. | |
| A pretty dark guy. | |
| But yeah, he actually... | |
| He can sing very well himself and play very well. | |
| I heard him do a cover of 10 CC's I'm Not In Love, and it was actually really good. | |
| But yeah, as far as I understand, he's just mostly a live musician for them. | |
| I have not seen him. | |
| I mean, he's listed on some songs with Dave, like helping him out, I'm sure. | |
| Which actually, in the one that he did help him out in Poison Heart, I gotta imagine that's his influence, because these chords are so big. | |
| Like, in Poison Heart, it's got the guitar and the two and the four, and it's got this G-sharp minor to E-minor major nine to D-sharp augmented. | |
| You have poison in your heart Yeah, I'm sure of it I knew right from the start From the moment we met You know These are not kind of typical Depeche Mode chords. | |
| I mean, Depeche Mode chords are simple but bold. | |
| I'm not putting them down. | |
| I was just intrigued by those chords. | |
| There's not a lot of seventh and ninth and, you know, extended chords, basically. | |
| Well, let's go back to bring it to a close because we'll do a kind of ongoing ranking of the albums. | |
| Where is this for you? | |
| Dead Last. | |
| Wow. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Sorry. | |
| Don't mean to disappoint you, Richard, but yeah, it's my least favorite. | |
| Interesting. | |
| It's not my least favorite. | |
| When we get to Sounds of the Universe, I'll know. | |
| I think those two are neck and neck. | |
| I would probably say on a good day, it's like a 5 out of 10 for me. | |
| Yeah, they're probably my second favorite band of all time, but I'm not thrilled. | |
| Fair. | |
| I would say it's lower. | |
| It's not quite at the bottom for me. | |
| I think you might be also giving A Broken Frame and so on more credit for the reasons that I mentioned earlier that it's just an essential album. | |
| You kind of can't do without it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I do realize, like, they set the bar so damn high with, you know, these other classic albums. | |
| But, you know, that's fine. | |
| It is what it is. |