Depeche Mode - Spirits in the Forest (2019)

'If there was a movie about them,' observed my friend Nick, 'they'd be running round the corner to escape the police in Basildon, and then be in a massive stadium with heroin addictions in the next frame.'

Surprisingly, there is a movie about them, and although Nick was off the mark where the plot is concerned, I nevertheless feel his comment expresses some deeper truth fairly well.

I recall Depeche Mode from way back, at least since they first started turning up in the pages of Sounds.

Ollie who worked in Discovery Records in Stratford referred to them as Depeche Toad, which was amusing; and Photographic on the Some Bizarre Album seemed like a fairly decent impersonation of Cabaret Voltaire, albeit without any of the funny noises which made Cabaret Voltaire interesting; and yet somehow there was a pervasive wholesome quality about them, something guileless, something a bit youth club with synths set up on the ping-pong table. This quality, whatever it was, lingered, rendering subsequent transgressions inherently comical, deeds effortfully undertaken as part of a futile effort to shake off the image, like kids with their first ciggies, lighting the wrong end and taking theatrical drags as though cameras might be running; and then there was the time they found those special sex clothes in that box at the back of dad's wardrobe, and then with the tatts and the arm candy...

I'm sure it was all real, but nevertheless, that's how it looked to me, and how it still looks despite everything. Even a few legitimately great songs - Two Minute Warning, Never Let Me Down Again, Enjoy the Silence, and probably a couple of others - can't quite shift the stench of pop, crisps, and jumpers knitted by your nan, which I propose even whilst holding that Dave Gahan is blessed with a genuinely powerful voice. I'm not even sure what it is - the ballsachingly appalling lyrics, Martin Gore's hair - which doubtless ensured that his dinner money never once saw the inside of the school canteen cash register, the plinky-plonky quality of certain songs, or something else, some emergent property resulting from a combination of indelibly wholesome factors.

Still, it was a free ticket for a film showing for one night only, so I wasn't going to say no, despite my reservations. I anticipated a documentary accounting for their transformation from Herman's Hermits into SPK and then ultimately into U2, but thankfully it was better than that. Spirits in the Forest has six Depeche Mode fans from across the globe tell their stories, interspersed with footage of a predictably massive concert in Berlin. It works because the fans, or at least these fans, are more interesting than the band, so they may as well be Lieutenant Pigeon obsessives for all the difference it makes; and I particularly enjoyed the story of DMK, a tribute act featuring a father and his two kids playing Depeche Mode covers on toy instruments. Actually, I think I liked them more than I liked the main feature.

The live footage, which punctuates the progress of our six fans as we follow them to the gig, fails to shed any light on the mystery of Depeche Mode, at least for me. What subtle qualities their less comical songs may have is lost once blasted out on a scale more suited to some Laibach parody, and Martin Gore standing around like a lemon with a guitar fails to make much difference to anything, and then we come to Dave Gahan, now a troubling hybrid of David Niven and John Waters whose face is too big for his head. His arms and legs are similarly too long for his body, which his weird Jagger impersonations only accentuate meaning that he now vaguely resembles one of those things from Ice Age. I don't understand why you would go to see this band, or why you would go to see them in a stadium the size of the Grand Canyon; but then I found it nevertheless watchable with a couple of decent tunes, despite it being Depeche Mode, so if that's your bag, I've no doubt that Spirits in the Forest must seem amazing.

Ice Cube - Raw Footage (2008)

The odds seemed stacked against this disc, the eighth solo album of a career spanning two decades by someone increasingly better known as a film maker and arguably creator of the hood chuckles genre - a rapper who had seemingly had his day; but not quite, at least not on close inspection. The last three albums had been less than amazing, but none were without their high points and whatever their problems may have been, it was never Cube's delivery. Surprisingly, Raw Footage is either his greatest single work, or just the one which made the most sense to me.

Admittedly, I picked this up on what was probably the equivalent of the first day of the rest of my life, new job in a different city, and a future which would either be disastrous or interesting but would at least be an alternative to rotting away in south-east London; and Raw Footage cemented itself immediately into my head, seemingly capturing the moment - which probably doesn't make any sense given that amongst all which Cube had on his mind when recording this album, moving back to his mum's house in Coventry and getting an agency job at Parcel Force doesn't seem to have figured highly. I guess it felt like a soundtrack for a future which once again held possibilities.

Ice Cube has forever moved with the times, musically speaking. It hasn't always quite worked, as on the War and Peace discs which have a bit of an also ran quality in relation to whatever else was going on at the end of the nineties. Raw Footage on the other hand sounded like it was about six months ahead of the curve with a sparse, spacious, yet luxuriant production of deep, deep bass and digital crunch, phone pings, detuned voice, yet more waveforms copied and pasted from place to place on a screen, and yet with Marvin Gaye levels of feeling. It's an album by an old guy, one happy to be older, wiser, and still very much disinclined to put up with any of your shit. Ice Cube's strength, aside from the obvious lyrical gymnastics, has forever been maintaining a fine balance between blasting your head off with the raw stuff whilst delivering one painful truth after another - black consciousness backpack with no qualms about punching you in the face, if you like; or regardless of whether you like it or not.

I Got My Locs On, Cold Places and Jack in the Box are as powerful, terrifying, chilling, and joyous as any of the man's greats, and this is one of those rare albums which is good to the last drop, an album which makes you want to rob a bank.

I didn't, by the way.

Nocturnal Emissions - Beyond Logic, Beyond Belief (1990)

I never quite got to the bottom of what this one was about beyond that it was clearly about something. It initially seemed to be some kind of celebration, an acknowledgement of Nocturnal Emissions first decade - the ten year anniversary of the release of Tissue of Lies without necessarily representing an extension of the same, at least not so far as I was ever able to tell. The sleeve claims the material to have been recorded between 1980 and 1990, which I assume refers to sound sources more than it does to any notion of previously unreleased tracks, so perhaps this is Nigel engaging in recycling, or at least making collages from his own back catalogue; which would account for the sample of Caroline K operating a hand drill - which I'd swear I've heard elsewhere, although not on Tissue of Lies at least.

Internet sources refer to some light having been shed in the first issue of Network News, which it isn't because I've checked. In fact I've checked the first three or four issues, none of which seem to contain this observation from our Nigel:

What's important in this culture we're now cultivating is we can gain an understanding of the world which speaks to us directly without the filters of belief which go within a spirit system, without the filters of logic that go with a science system.

So, if that's from the first issue of Network News, then I guess it isn't the one published in my reality; which may actually be approaching the elusive point, at last.

The last decade of the twentieth century had just begun, and Sterile Records was recently reborn as Earthly Delights, sort of its thematic opposite given the preoccupation with fertility and growth, but still releasing art which channelled rather than described its world - not quite refocussing so much as working from a much broader, even cosmic palette rather than limiting itself to the human cultural sphere of society ruined by industry. This was the point at which Nigel noticed how his earlier works had been changing hands for silly money and so decided that some of this money might be better spent in support of living art rather than historical documents, so this was issued in an edition of just 250 copies for what seemed a lot at the time, being more than the customary tenner, but I'm fucking glad I had the foresight to buy one. One bloke on the internet suggested this might even be Nocturnal Emissions' greatest work, and even if it isn't, it's easy to see why someone might have made such a claim.

Beyond Logic, Beyond Belief is well into what has been poorly characterised as the ambient years, but isn't really anything of the sort. It's atmospheric, evocative, and powerfully emotional without quite doing anything musical in the traditional sense, possibly excepting the oddly bluesy Memphis. Aside from the obvious sampling, it's not even particularly electronic. At the risk of turning into Paul Morley, and in light of the few clues afforded by titles, sound, and the above quotation, I'd say this is Nocturnal Emissions scrabbling at a description of reality analogous to Plato's ideal forms, the thing in itself, whatever the hell is there before we muss it up with sentences such as this one, or any language for that matter; and that's what the best art is all about. If I were able to describe it, it wouldn't need to exist.

Genuinely magnificent.

Stephen Mallinder - Um Dada (2019)

I wasn't really expecting a whole lot of this one, having been somewhat inundated with newly unearthed Cabaret Voltaire material of late; but bloody hell - it may even be the best thing he's ever had a hand in. His previous solo album was Pow Wow, a couple of decades back which, although it sounds so different in terms of instrumentation as to have been recorded by someone else, somehow feels similar. Actually that's probably a redundant observation given that Um Dada similarly shares common ground with the very best Cabaret Voltaire material in being extended grooves rather than songs; and while there's always been a funky element, this time it verges on nu disco. Benge is involved in some capacity, which may - I suppose - be significant in how this relates to the last couple of Wrangler releases with that same popping analogue bop underpinning the beats like nothing so much as a distant descendant of Jack the Groove - which isn't a comparison I make lightly.

Um Dada is seven tracks of electric disco-house perfection and stands as contender for album of the year, possibly the century, and possibly also Mallinder's entire back catalogue. I'm told Cabaret Voltaire still exist as Richard H. Kirk's solo thing due to his having taken a bit of a funny turn in recent times; so I don't know what he's been up to in Mallinder's absence, but it would have to be pretty fucking skippy to come close to this one.

I'm not sure I've heard a stack of bleeping, blooping machines ever sound quite so human or organic as what we have here.