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Memento Mori COLUMBIA/MUTE 8/10

Now a mordant synth duo, Gahan and Gore release their finest record of the 21st century.

By Stephen Troussé

Gore and Gahan, aka Depeche Mode, NYC, 2022

ANTON CORBIJN

MAYBE Depeche Mode were always destined to assume their final form as a synth duo. Way back in their early days, after they formed at a Basildon school concert in June 1980, they felt a little like a rock band who hadn’t quite completed their electronic evolution, and had been left with vestigial members, guys who might have once been bass players or drummers, and now were simply required to prod monosynths while looking moody on Top Of The Pops. Vince Clarke certainly seemed to think so, jumping ship as soon as possible to form Yazoo and Erasure.

But maybe the other guys – Alan Wilder, recruited as a kind of in-house musical director after Clarke’s departure, and Andy Fletcher, the dependable Basildon soul of the band – were always needed as a kind of interpersonal buffer, precisely because, once things got cooking, the core of the band was too volatile to be sustainable. Flood identified Dave Gahan and Martin Gore early on as respectively the attitude and the ideas that fuelled Depeche Mode. But for all the band’s astonishing success, it never felt like a creative marriage of minds or even a wary co-dependency, but more like some highly unstable, fissile chemical reaction: the Essex wideboy turned LA rock casualty and the ruined choirboy turned Berlin sex dungeoneer. For much of the band’s imperial phase they couldn’t live on the same continent, let alone share a tour bus. But now, following Fletch’s untimely death last year, they are two. And though as men in their sixties, post detox, rehab and therapy, you don’t expect spectacular, ruinous conflagrations, what’s remarkable is that Memento Mori, their 15th album, is their most powerful work this century. It’s the sound of a band entering a final act with a renewed sense of purpose, and sharp, sober new focus.

“Ghosts Again”, the lead single, emerged with February’s snowdrops and had a startling freshness, recalling Bowie’s “Where Are We Now?” in its bittersweet reckoning with lost time. The shade of Bowie was compounded by Anton Corbijn’s beautifully stark, Bergmanesque video, and the revelation that the song was one of a handful of new collaborations between Martin Gore and The Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler. The echo of Bowie, passed down through Butler’s phrases (“you drive like a demon”, from “Caroline’s Monkey”) and phrasing, into Gahan’s bereft croon (remember that he first got the DM gig after the fledging band saw him singing “Heroes” in an Essex scout hut) sets the tone for Memento Mori as a great, unexpected late career regeneration.