On the contrary I think A Broken Frame is quite good. It's like someone merged S&S with Some Great Reward; a nice mix of mindless fun ('See You', 'Meaning of Love') and darker stuff ( 'Satellite', 'Leave in Silence'). Their music videos from that period are awful though, I don't say this often but they should be left in the '80s! I don't get why this album gets so much stick, the fact that their main songwriter and synth player Clarke had left the band months earlier and they still managed to cough up Frame, is enough to give it at least some merit. It must be funny seeing some teens nowadays getting into Depeche through 'Violator', 'Black Celebration' etc, then delving into their earlier stuff and coming across 'The Meaning of Love' or 'What's your Name'!
A Broken Frame is far better than the Martin-solo stuff done once Alan left. And I know people think it's twee, but See You is a synth-pop masterpiece IMHO; just as good as OMD's Enola Gay or Ultravox's Vienna.
“See You” is a phenomenal song, and there are a few other great songs on there (I’d include “The Meaning of Love”). But there’s also a lot of lower tier stuff, too, that makes the overall release pretty spotty.
I’m in the same boat. I really start with Black Celebration and didn’t really go past Ultra. That was the golden period of DM for me. My favorite being Music For The Masses.
ABF is one of my favorite DM albums. It was also the first DM album I bought, so that may have something to do with it. I was never a big fan of Martin's songs on the later albums and tend to skip them when I listen to those albums now, but I love/like every song on ABF. In fact, the first 3 albums are probably the only DM albums that I can still listen to without skipping any songs.
Is this thread already dead. 2 songs in 5 days. There should be at Least 1 albums worth of songs each week, which is about 2 songs each day. The way this is going we might get to Construction Time by the January.
Back to this for a second. This take is far too cynical for me. As good as some of those singles may have been (and there are a lot of people who believe in "Love Action"), the band themselves tried to stop the machine when "Don't You Want Me" was suggested as the 4th single from the record and only begrudgingly released it. I guess Phil Oakey thought it was crap and he's the one who originally fought with the producer about its inclusion on the record and relegated it to the bottom of the tracklist. He was too close to it. When you have a song like that, someone has to tell you that you're wrong about it. The song is considered the beginning of the 2nd British Invasion in the U.S. That song, and the floodgates it opened, meant that a suburban kid in the flyover part of the country would be introduced to all sorts of great stuff he really shouldn't have, not least of which was Depeche Mode. Anyway. "Open Your Heart" is mediocre and there's nothing about that record, if you remove the era-defining hit nearly hidden on side 2, that truly smells like a money hunt.
Puppets - Now here's where things really start to get interesting. The first dark tune on the album, the lyrics are about...puppetry! Well, you could interpret them as about an abusive relationship, but I prefer to take things literally. The speaker has full control over his puppets, controlling their every action, while they can only talk in protest. Pretty spooky. Kinda reminds me of Mind Of A Toy by Visage, only a year earlier, though that was about kids mistreating their toys. The bassline is so deep and meaty you can feel the notes in your bones, with a relatively sparse melody in comparison. A great song with a unique lyrical subject, and the harbinger of things to come - darker things, that is. 5/5
— I totally agree. Though tainted as being naive, kid-Mode, I enjoy these early material for their bounce. I like Speak and Spell better than any album after Ultra, which I find the same old songs done time after time. Hard to get a pulse with some of them.
#2 should be "I Sometimes Wish I Was Dead" The greatest title given to one of the pop-iest tunes Vince ever penned
I always interpreted the lyrics to Puppets as an abusive relationship and thought this 'seriousness' sounded forced and rather sloppy for a group 19 year olds, and out of place on the record. Never interpreted them as literally about puppets though, interesting! As for the melody I'm there all the way, love the beat and the background synth melody
I agree with a song a day to keep things moving forward. Puppets I agree this is where it gets interesting. S&S has a variety of songs, and this is where it becomes obvious. I've alway interpreted this song to be about abusive relationships, and as such it is more similar to DM's later work. This is a song I can imagine Martin writing. While quite a few other songs I can't really. (Despite 'But Not Tonight' and 'Meaning of Life' existing.) The synth accompaniment is interesting, and so is Dave's vocal. Very catchy, but also with a dark side. 4.1/5
By the way...this is a Depeche thread and I'm very disappointed that no die hard fans have noticed my icon One of Brian Griffin's potential cover photos for the debut. Check out his website, he has dozens of 'out takes' for S&S, ABF , Construction and Reward. Very interesting.
"Puppets" is fine, but like a number of songs from the period, to me at least, most songs don't have an individual identity but exists as part of the whole. It's slightly darker, and kept with the bands setlists until about 1984 or so if I remember correctly, but it's not in the top half of their overall work.
Speak And Spell is a very fine debut. I like the tightness of the performances. After Vince left it took them a couple of albums to reach the level of this album IMO. Though every DM album has something worthwhile going for it.
"Puppets" is really believably not a Vince Clarke song. I don't know of anything else in his early work that sounds like this. And he's never really done dark rhythms with Erasure either. I mean, maybe you hear it in "Leave Me to Bleed." Not much after that. This track would be one of the album highlights, except Dave (who is perhaps my favorite vocalist ever) is singing it in the soft voice he uses almost exclusively on A Broken Frame. I like his richer and more soulful baritone.
