| M2 | ||
| Well -- the new Depeche Mode song is pretty good; I didn’t catch its title, and I don’t suppose it matters, since if you’re reading this you must be online and are therefore able to do the research yourself with a minimum of effort. It was somewhat better than the Cold song, even though it’s morning in the garden of Cold’s career while it’s twilight in the climbing wisteria of the D-Mode’s twenty-year ride. In the video, the guys are riding in a car through the desert; their hair is unremarkable, at least compared to what they used to look like, and the lines on their faces speak volumes. In their days of pomp and glory they were the best at what they did (unless you count New Order, and I don’t, because New Order always existed in an uncrowded field of one, and any similarities to their contemporaries were purely cosmetic), and they bring a seasoned professionalism to their new song; they’ve been using synthesizers longer than almost anybody you can name, and they’ve learned over the years how to make them sketch subtle textural shadings along the bedrock of a three-minute pop song. For the Depeche Mode video to follow the Cold video meant that some of the people who worked in programming at M2 must still be on board, drawing interesting points of comparison by monkeying around with sequencing, playing sonically disparate but metaphorically similar acts side by side. |
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