Music
Review: Depeche Mode Back In ‘Violator’ Mode on 14th LP ‘Spirit’
Our take on the latest from the electro-pop veterans
For nearly four decades, Depeche Mode have majored in gloomy meditations on their own personal shortcomings. But their 14th LP offers a bitter, sorrowful elegy for the outside world. Nearly every song on Spirit laments the death of human decency, often in disarmingly beautiful ways (see the fuzzy ballad “Fail,” the forlornly crooned “Poison Heart”). They sometimes drift into heavy-handed polemics (“Where’s the Revolution”). But with a smart mix of techno-leaning keyboards and bluesy guitar, à la their 1990 high-water mark, Violator, it’s easy to get swept away in their gospel.