Memento Mori – “remember that you die” – would have been an apt album title for black leather synth rockers Depeche Mode at any point, but it feels especially powerful right now. Conceived during the early part of the pandemic, when death was looming in most people’s minds, the band’s fifteenth album was also haunted by the fact that, as they hit their sixties, chief songwriter Martin Gore was about to be the same age as his stepfather, who raised him, was when he died.
Then founding member Andy “Fletch” Fletcher passed away suddenly, age 60, from an aortic dissection last May. Like The Rolling Stones losing Charlie Watts or The Who losing John Entwistle, Fletch lacked star quality next to mercurial Gore or sepulchral singer Dave Gahan, but his absence alters the dynamic considerably. Without their buffer, the often remote surviving pair have found themselves working together more closely. Others let into the fold this time include James Ford, the sometime Arctic Monkeys producer who also worked on the last Depeche Mode album, experimental Italian producer Marta Salogni, and Psychedelic Furs frontman Richard Butler, who co-wrote four songs.
Right from the floral tribute angel wings on the black and white cover to the opening song, My Cosmos is Mine, the mood is set. Industrial beats clank and hiss, an electronic bass sound plays the starkest melody and Gahan intones in low slow motion: “No rain, no clouds, no pain, no shrouds/No final breaths, no senseless deaths.”
While in the past the band have successfully blended electronic soundscapes with grandiose rock dynamics, here a guitar is a rare sighting, though a raw riff appears in the chorus of Never Let Me Go. More often the dominant synth sounds recall the earliest days of electronic music. The repeated motif of People Are Good sounds like a knowing Kraftwerk tribute. Wagging Tongue could have been made by the band’s Eighties incarnation.
The pace stays slow, the mood gloomy, even on the catchier single Ghosts Again. The power comes from the scale of the computer effects, which pile up to a towering size on that song and reach a celestial grandeur on the beatless finale, Speak to Me.
As a new duo there’s a strong motivation for them to do more than simply add a few tolerable tunes to their latest stadium setlist. Always serious, you can hear that this time they really mean it.
