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Even the album’s first single, “Heaven,” while still good, isn’t terribly catchy for a lead-off single. The fundamental problem with it is that the band has strayed too far away by this point from what it does best: not only is there little here on this ballad-heavy disc that you can dance to (with “Should Be Here” being the only possible exception, and even that one comes from the pen of Dave Gahan, not primary songwriter Martin Gore), but the band is favoring mood too heavily over a memorable melody, and while the disc is often quite beautiful, it’s also incredibly lacking in the hooks department, so it’s fairly hard to remember how most of these songs go. While this isn’t exactly a great disc to listen to in its entirety in one sitting unless you’re in just the right mood, there are a handful of very good individual tracks, particularly “Home,” “Useless,” “The Bottom Line,” and, best of all, the slinky Top 40 hit “It’s No Good,” which is every bit as brilliant – and even catchier – than Songs of Faith and Devotion’s “Walking in My Shoes.”Īrguably the most disappointing album the band has made to date and certainly the most disappointing they’ve made since Ultra, this isn’t technically a bad album, but it’s not exactly good, either. Mind you, the band wasn’t in the best of places at the time – Alan Wilder had quit the band by this point, while Gahan and Gore were wrestling with drug and alcohol addictions, respectively, and Andy Fletcher was suffering from depression – so it’s perhaps understandable that the music here is so dark (the lead-off single, “Barrel of a Gun,” even makes the Beatles’ “Yer Blues” sound happy in comparison), but it’s hard to avoid feeling that they should have waited to go back in the studio until they were in a slightly happier frame of mind.
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Those two songs are placed at the beginning of the disc, which makes the rest of the album seem slightly anticlimactic, but there are still plenty of fine songs throughout, including “The Mercy in You,” “Condemnation,” and “In Your Room.”Įasily the band’s gloomiest album, this isn’t a terrible disc by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not exactly a heck of a lot of fun, either. It’s obvious from the cut that the band has been listening to Nine Inch Nails lately, but it doesn’t sound like a rip-off, either, and as completely left-field as it sounds upon first listen, it’s also one of the band’s all-time greatest moments and deservedly reached the Top 40. It’s a tad spottier than Violator, and it’s noticeably darker and gloomier than its predecessor as well, so there’s nothing here quite as effervescent as “Enjoy the Silence.” Still, this is a very well-crafted album, and though the band isn’t exactly in the happiest of moods here, they haven’t stopped delivering hooks, either, so there’s plenty of memorable tunes here, especially the slithering, eerie grooves of “Walking in My Shoes” and the fiery, thrashing “I Feel You,” which opens the album with a jarring burst of feedback before easing into a surprisingly catchy, dirty, grinding blues-rock number that is easily the most rock-and-roll oriented cut the band has attempted to date.
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Songs of Faith and Devotion (1993, Sire/Reprise)