Playing the Angel

Depeche Mode first emerged from the suburban murk a quarter of a century ago, dressed like refugees from a bad cyber-punk novel and touting shrill, sulky electro-rock.
Fashion and pop have, in the intervening decades, left behind the synth-wars. On the evidence of Playing The Angel, nobody has taken the trouble to inform The Mode.
Awash with tinny drum machines and bleeping keyboards, the band’s eleventh album sounds like a time-capsule loaded up with brooding synthetic-dirges and beamed two decades into the future.
What results feels very nearly definitive. Sweepingly angsty, Playing The Angel is the cyber-schlock masterpiece Martin Gore, DM-songwriter-in chief, has always threatened.
That Depeche Mode should fetch up in 2005 in such good fettle is, of course, enormously ironic.
This, you will recall, is a band that has more than once been pronounced dead. Literally, in the case of vocalist Dave Gahan, who, in the early ‘90s, embraced suicidal excess as a career move (he has apparently recovered, contributing three compositions here).
Yet, while their peers from the first wave synth-pop – bands such as New Order and The Cure – flounder, increasingly in irrelevance, DMs midnight mojo keeps burning darkly.
The album begins as it means to continue, with a clatter of growling synths, underpinned by a melancholic squall of melody.
Opener ‘A Pain That I’m Used To’ judders and snarls, erupting, after what feels an age, into a lugubrious quasi-chorus.
Elsewhere, ‘Precious’ suggests Nine Inch Nails on a Prozac binge while ‘Lillian’ is the perhaps the year’s most essential love song about a commitment-phobic dominatrix .
Bleakly majestic, Playing The Angel reveals Depeche Mode to be the last electro-goth warriors standing.