Dark Magic

Three-decade high from Basildon's finest on blackest celebration yet.

- Jeremy Allen

Depeche Mode

Memento Mori

4/5

Sony 1965878421 (CD, 2LP)

An album called Memento Mori made by inveterate electro-miserabilists Depeche Mode could have been bleaker than this. The untimely death of founding member Andy Fletcher last May left the remaining pair of Martin L Gore and Dave Gahan deliberating on whether they should even continue, such was the importance of his presence throughout the last four decades. Fletch looms large over Memento Mori, though that, too, was largely his job when he was alive. If his absence makes little difference to the publishing rights, it's still disarming seeing Gore and Gahan now pictured as a duo.

As it turns out, much of the record had already been written in 2020, a proverbial silver lining that came from the cloud of the Covid 19 interregnum. Moreover, to say the remaining members are having fun here would be overstating it, but Depeche Mode's 15th studio album certainly has moments of levity and playfulness, as well as an adventurous spirit-something that hasn't always been in abundance with their 21st-century output.

In recent years, it would be fair to say that Depeche Mode's material has conformed to a prevailing sound, invariably guided by Gahan's dolorous horn of a voice and underpinned by steady, chugging sequencers clocking in at around the 50bpm mark, leaving little room for surprises. Only Always You here follows that adequate, DM-by-numbers approach. That's not to say that there haven't been subtle attempts to shake things up: 2017's Spirit offset some of the customary navel-gazing with songs of a more outward-looking nature, their most political album to date, though a track like Where's The Revolution? was more likely to incite calls of "what's it to you, grandad?" than stir up a nationwide insurrection.