Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 20/04/09
Label: Mute

Pitch black electronica and a scuffed up baritone, dollops of self loathing served up with queasy romanticism and off-key mysticism, songs called "In Chains", "Wrong", "Jezebel" and - cough - "Hole To Feed". Yes, it can only be a Depeche Mode album, and it's a lot more enjoyable than it sounds. Scraping off some of the guitar scuzz from the preceding "Playing The Angel", "Sounds Of The Universe" reveals some of the buffed up shine that made "Music For The Masses" and "Violator" such masterpieces, though without surrendering all the rawness of more recent years.

Of those rawer songs, lead single "Wrong" and "Come Back" are the most effective. The former may be written by Martin Gore but, as is often the case, he seems to be doing so from somewhere deep inside Gahan's head. "I was marching to the wrong drum with the wrong scum", the former addict singer spits with the righteous fury of a street preacher, backed by sawing analogue synths, and it's impossible not to think of his past, epic drug addictions. The Gahan-written "Come Back" is a stranger beast, with a beseeching melody and lyric, but an underpinning of clanging metallic percussion and smears of grimy guitar.

At other moments the band sound as gentle and poppy as they have in some time. On "Fragile Tension", they dig back into the bouncy synth pop that first made their name, though Gahan adds a vocal of far greater authority and depth than he could have mustered back when he was a Basildon teen mag puppy dog. "Peace", on the other hand, is something strikingly new in the Depeche Mode songbook: not only a straight duet between Gore and Gahan, but bathed in warm, velvety keyboard washes and an apparently irony-free optimism.

Elsewhere the band revisit old themes and sounds (the moody, murkily sexual electronica of "In Chains", the down-in-the-dirt nastiness of "Hole To Feed") but with much more conviction and energy than you could fairly expect from any band on their 12th album. There are only a couple of misfires. On "Jezebel", Gore once again takes over balladeer duties, with the usual slightly cloying results, while the instrumental "Spacewalker" - all dated squiggles and retro plinky plonking - seems unnecessary and misjudged.

Of course, the fate of all Depeche Mode records (in this country at least) is to be dismissed as a little bit preposterous, a little bit over-wrought, a little bit un-English. There's some truth in these accusations. But "Sounds Of The Universe" also happens to throb with sonic originality and dark, complex humanity, and is a fine addition to one of the richest, most intriguing back catalogues in pop.

    by Jaime Gill