DEPECHE MODE SONGS SUNG BY MARTIN GORE TV

No interviews, TV appearances or live dates. Insight 2/5ДЄfter the release of Ultra, Depeche Mode effectively powered down for a period - with two single releases in Home and Useless (combined together as a double-A side in the US), but no activity apart from two video shoots. That Ultra exists at all is both unexpected and surprising, but in retrospect it feels like the band barely stumbled to the finish line of recording before collapsing in a somewhat exhausted heap that they followed with 16 months off. It was played 72 times, mostly in 2009-18. Not played live unless sung by Martin in the acoustic slot, it's a thoroughly unexceptional Depeche Mode LP track that I never return to. Though the lyrics are somewhat abstract and meaningless, with no real story in them apart from possibly the continuation of a potentially unrequited love or a hope to recover something that is lost. About the only thing that sounds 'awake' is Gore's underpinning backing vocals in the verse and the climax ' give love you've gotta give give love you've gotta give love you've gotta -' which handily starts mid-line and thus sounds a little more engaging. One song on this album like this would be fine, but three in a row seems a bit uninspired, not helped with a limp snare drum sound (if its there at all, I think it's all percussion and texture), alongside a barely present bass line.

There'n a lack of dynamics, and inventive rhythms, and it's all so tasteful, restrained, minimal, elegant, and thus, a bit dry. Insight is a much, much better and livelier song that the two that preceded it, but it's still not great at all : the musical arrangement, like much of the rest of Ultra sounds like Depeche Mode trying to sound like Depeche Mode again, and not quite hitting the mark. stumbling along with the pretty good but clearly wounded Up LP. It's an OK, serviceable song, but like a number of their contemporaries, the band seemed to be feeling a little Out Of Time, as they'd entered the 'legacy act' stage of their career, with The Cure tanking with Wild Mood Swings, New Order in pieces, and R.E.M. Depeche Mode seemed more like a job to the band members at this point than any other time in their career, and I got the feeling that some of them weren't really enjoying it. More accurately I found the period 1997-2001 tough going as a fan as the band adapted to life without Alan, a newly sober Gahan, and Gore himself suffered from writers block.

The next fifteen or so songs you'll think I hate Depeche Mode.

Depeche mode songs sung by martin gore