Depeche Mode - Music for the Masses
Songs:
-Never Let Me Down Again
-The Things You Said
-Strangelove
-Sacred
-Little 15
-Behind the Wheel
-I Want You Now
-To Have and to Hold
-Nothing
-Pimpf
After Duran Duran, Depeche Mode was probably the second most popular band name you would find on any girl's book cover/folder in high school back in the '80s. Sad to say that, given my tastes at the time, I probably would not have given these guys the time of day had I not had good friend Dave, who was heavily into new wave, love them so much. He got me into them before this album dropped, so I was already into some of the older stuff.
This album saw them go for a broader commercial appeal. And it worked. Maybe this was yet another band on the sellout train. But if the songs are solid--and these are--who cares?
I gave this album a lot of spins back in the day. Outside the hits, I don't remember a lot of the songs anymore. But Behind the Wheel probably remains my favorite.
Although the band fully embraced more of a rock/alternative bent later on, they still relied heavily on synths and their new wave roots for this one. Along those lines, my gf at the time took me to see them for my 18th birthday at the biggest of our local sheds back then. We had lawn tickets (we were poor HS students, after all), and I have to say that, while I enjoyed the music, it remains one of the most boring shows I have ever attended. As I recall, even the drums were synth/programmed at this stage in the band's history, so Martin (the singer) was the ONLY one of them who wasn't tied to one location for the entire show. So you had three guys playing motionlessly, and Martin running around the stage trying to make up for it on mostly dark, brooding synth music where running around didn't really fit. Still, the music was incredibly solid, as portrayed on the 1989 live release titled "101." Speaking of which, I need to track down another copy of that album. For anyone who likes this era of the band, it nicely captured a great mix of solid performances of songs from this album, as well as some classic older tunes like Blasphemous Rumours, Black Celebration, and A Question of Lust.