33 rebellions per minute
"You've got your leather boots on; is there something to do?
1984
Depeche Mode, SOME GREAT REWARD
Depeche Mode do not have a reputation as innovators, and in order to save myself a needless fit of indignation, I pause here to remind myself that mostly, this is because they weren't very innovative. Their early albums were openly disposable electro-pop, "songs" constructed from one simple hook apiece; their later albums tended, despite catchy highlights like "Personal Jesus" and "It's No Good", to be dirgey moodscapes built on zero hooks apiece (my favorite song from their later years, "Halo", has the distinction of being, perhaps by accident, a near-exact imitation of David Bowie's "As The World Falls Down" from Jim Henson's great movie movie Labyrinth). Still, I consider SOME GREAT REWARD a transitional one-album merging of the strengths of both approaches. And if you accept, as I do, that Nine Inch Nails' DOWNWARD SPIRAL was a deeply influential album-- dragging Filter, Gravity Kills, Stabbing Westward, Radio Iodine, and several other point-missing chart invaders in its wake-- and that DOWNWARD SPIRAL was much too bizarre and impenetrably dense to have succeeded without PRETTY HATE MACHINE first establishing the Nine Inch Nails brand's market value, then SOME GREAT REWARD, as the obvious model for NIN's first album, becomes a godfather for the commercial, melodic side of "industrial music".
That's a musical model to which I refer, not a songwriting model. Listen to REWARD and PRETTY back to back and you should hear very similar ways of layering weird mechanical death-disco sounds in such a way that the noise, beat, and melody are often provided at once by the exact same sound. Check how "Something To Do" makes a frantic everything-at-once beat like a Lotto or Keno machine randomly shuffling a choice of xylophone bars. "People Are People", a hit song, whips a melodic hook out of what seems to be a heavily echoed scratch-sampled video-game noise, and another out of a young talking computer training itself by humming the vowel sounds. The lascivious "Master And Servant" and the chilly "Blasphemous Rumours" have bridges that are nothing but playful juxtaposing of sounds to a good beat, and the former's vocal "Owww!"s come from the same joyous vein as on the Cure's "Lovecats". "It Doesn't Matter", best of all, aces out NIN's "Something I Can Never Have" in advance in proving that the most gorgeous song on an album can also be, by far, the most disturbing: it makes a bed of extraordinarily warm computerized sounds, like Bill Nelson might create on an inspired day, and sways the bed back and forth over a canyon, strafed by dissonant gongs and Attack Of The Mothership blarings from "Astrosmash", never quite settling into the pretty melodies offered, or into any settled rhythm, or into anything like concurrence with the vocals.
Those vocals, written by Martin Gore and sung by David Gahan, are where the impressive is elevated into genius, for me. Read on paper, lines like a rejected lover's "I will thank you most of all for the respect you have for me/ I'm embarrassed, it overwhelms me, becuase I don't deserve any/ it doesn't matter if this all shatters, nothing lasts forever" look impossibly stilted and formal. But Gahan sings them _as_ impossibly stilted and formal, in his attractively aristocratic deep voice, and in that come their sincerity: the evasiveness of a man who won't quite admit a heartbreak is, for me, far more disquieting than the average display of screams and tears. "Take a look at unselected cases/ you will find love has been wrecked/ by both sides compromising/ to a disastrous effect/ but not me, I won't do that/ I won't sacrifice anything at all for love"-- from "Stories Of Old", enhanced by woodwind and wheezing android tenor and gloriously vague Easternisms a la "Walk Like An Egyptian"-- is pretty much Trent Reznor's later "nothing can stop me now, cuz I don't care anymore" in fancy dress and a sincere if dubious attempt at perspective. Similarly, "People Are People"'s boringly right-on humanism-- "I'm relying on your common decency/ so far it hasn't surfaced but I'm sure it exists/ it just takes awhile to travel from your head to your fists/ I don't understand/ what makes a man/ hate another man"-- achieves interest through its pained working out via axioms and theorems (and pain). In some cases the formality hides broader anger, as in the tale behind "I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours/ but I think that God's got a sick sense of humor/ and when I die I expect to find him laughing"; but in some cases it melds their own humor, defending sadomasochism's power dynamics as infinitely more fun than the identical dynamics of the 9 to 5+ work-world. Or maybe that isn't humor either; speaking here without personal experience, I suppose they probably have a point. Academics talk funny, and pop stars talking like academics talk even funnier, but sometimes they have something worth saying. Especially if the music behind it is enough to shame 99% of its many impressed imitators.
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