Review: Playing The Angel

Depeche Mode have a new album out (meaning they now have a 24-year-old career). Bands once mocked now have a quarter of a century under their belts, and serious discographies and histories worth considering.

The new Depeche Mode album, Playing The Angel, is not as good as Violator or Music for the Masses, which arguably have the key songs, and are in fact from the golden middle period (after the early candy-synth and before the portentous slow decline into irrelevance) - but it is a work that coldly, and strongly, references the whole back catalogue with sinister wit.

Depeche Mode are loved by some, and regarded as faintly silly by most others, and for the same reasons: their merger of S&M, biblical allusion, electronic music and ultra-louche posturing (where all behaviour is deontologically challenged) is a brew not all may consume lightly.

I have always considered them natural heirs to the Byronic tradition: there is nothing Byron (or the idea of Byron) didn't do they have done, which includes the opiates and the orgies - with a curious C.S. Lewis Screwtape Letters diabolism. In fact, it is surprising they have never titled an album Screwtape - it would be be the summation of their summa psychopathologica - that is, they take the path of Judas, and celebrate it. They combine Poe and the Pope.

The best song on the new album is undoubtedly "John The Revelator" - a clear homage to their own "Personal Jesus" - which is about as joyous a misuse of American Gospel Born Again rhetoric and music as can be imagined - it is as if a Mormon choir joined Nine Inch Nails on tour and really got into it. This is what Depeche Mode do better than anyone else - desecrate the transcendental like some sort of coy William Empson about to be sent down for having a condom in his digs. That is, if they are of the devil's party, it isn't for want of trying to get into Magdalene first.

The rest of the album sags under the weight of too many dreamy ballads and less than impressive forays into their slow stuff. But it has three other highlights: "I Want It All"; "Lilian" and "Suffer Well" - which basically sum all their tropes up, lyrically and musically, but with valedictory panache, at least. Of these, "Lilian" is the most refreshing - it is rare for a Depeche Mode song to actually celebrate an actual person as subject (if even a fictional one) - too often their love objects are simply objects, and love isn't the right word to use either.

One final note: the James Bond franchise has overlooked DM for their theme song as often as the Tories have Ken Clarke - and this should stop. No other contemporary British band combines European sophistication, real menace, and kitsch as well as they.

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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