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

Imploding The Mirage , as critics and reviewers will quickly inform you, is a title that refers to the famous Las Vegas casino's demolition, which made way for something arguably even snazzier, or more empty. Born in Vegas, that most artificial and symbolic of American places (famous for gambling, glitz, misadventure, criminal origins, and mass murders), The Killers - named after a Hemingway-based film noir, but following in the footsteps of numerous rock acts that have signalled their outlaw claims with similar names ( Jerry Lee Lewis was called The Killer) - are a very American rock band. That their lead singer, Brandon Flowers , is famously a Mormon and allegedly a straight arrow, albeit flamboyant on stage, only adds to the resonant enigma - they are part of the myth of the American Dream, while in classic post-modern mode, nod to the artifice, albeit a non-nihilistic one with a God. Their inoffensive, hummable songs, mainly about broken hearts, yearning, broken lives, and ho...

Bear In Heaven are yet another one of these "Brooklyn Indie Bands" that are essentially synth-rock outfits, all reverb and as Pitchfork notes , digitization.  Well, I love their new album, just out, I Love You, It's Cool . Fresh as new paint from Tom Sawyer's brush, the songs answer the question, what would happen if Animal Collective went back in time and fused with Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears .  You'd get loping, emotive, ultra-cool synth songs with just a bit more dreampop shiver-shimmer, sung in an American key of boyish yearning.  'Sinful Nature' and 'The Reflection of You' are two of the best indie pop songs you'll hear in 2012, or 1982.

The new Bond film premiered last night in London. More on that later. What was missing on the red carpet was a band: Depeche Mode . Somehow, the Bond producers never got it - there has never been a group whose music so perfectly meets the special needs of their franchise - whose every song has always fused sex, violence, technical precision and strange passion - in short, pop songs for the age of everyday psychopathology. Perhaps what makes almost every one from critic to mogul to man in the street, in the UK, somehow underestimate DM is that, in a secular climate, their heat is partially generated by the frisson of Deep South Bible Belt spanking. "Personal Jesus" is a good place to start. It opens their best of (18 tracks, only one new, "Martyr). The song broke DM in America in a way that has never happened, say, for Robbie Williams (a blessing). It became the template for later Depeche Mode songs, even albums, and remains their most striking and frankly disturbing wor...

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 hav...