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Depeche Mode: Songs of Faith and Devotion

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Mute Records
Released: 1993.03.22
Time:
 47:26
Category: Synthpop
Producer(s): Depeche Mode, Mark "Flood" Ellis
Rating: ****...... (4/10)
Media type: CD
Web address: www.depechemode.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2013
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] I Feel You (M.L.Gore) - 4:35
[2] Walking in My Shoes (M.L.Gore) - 5:35
[3] Condemnation (M.L.Gore) - 3:20
[4] Mercy in You (M.L.Gore) - 4:17
[5] Judas (M.L.Gore) - 5:14
[6] In Your Room (M.L.Gore) - 6:26
[7] Get Right with Me / Interlude #4 (M.L.Gore) - 3:52
[8] Rush (M.L.Gore) - 4:37
[9] One Caress (M.L.Gore) - 3:32
[10] Higher Love (M.L.Gore) - 5:56

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Martin L. Gore - Keyboards, Guitar, Vocals
Dave Gahan - Lead Vocals
Andrew Fletcher - Keyboards
Alan Wilder - Keyboards, Drums

Steáfán Hannigan - Uilleann Pipes on [5]
Hildia Campbell - Additional Vocals on [7]
Bazil Meade - Additional Vocals on [7]
Samantha Smith - Additional Vocals On [7]
Wil Malone - String Arrangement And Conducting on [9]

Mark Einstmann - Assistant Engineering
Shaun De Feo - Assistant Engineering
Mark "Flood" Ellis - Mixing, Production

Chris Dickie - Engineering
Paul Kendall - Engineering
Steve Lyon - Engineering
Depeche Mode - Mixing, Production
Kevin Metcalfe - Mastering
Mark Stent - Mixing
Matthew Vaughan - Additional Programming
Volke Schneider - Assistant Engineering
Jeremy Wheatley - Assistant Engineering
Area - Sleeve Design
Daryl Bamonte - Album Coordination
Anton Corbijn - Art Direction, Sleeve Design, Visuals

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


1993 CD Mute CD STUMM 106

Recorded in Madrid & Hamburg (Chateau Du Pape). Mixed in London (Olympic Studios).

Track 7 contains a short hidden track, an excerpt from one of Brian Eno's remixes of "I Feel You"




Songs of Faith and Devotion is the eighth studio album by English electronic music band Depeche Mode, released in the United Kingdom on 22 March 1993 by Mute Records and in the United States and Canada on 23 March by Sire and Reprise Records. The album incorporated a more aggressive, darker rock-oriented tone than its predecessor, Violator (1990), largely influenced by the emerging alternative rock and grunge scenes in the United States. Upon its release, Songs of Faith and Devotion reached number one in several countries, and became the first Depeche Mode album to debut atop the charts in both the UK and the US. To support the album, Depeche Mode embarked on the fourteen-month long Devotional Tour, the largest tour the band had ever undertaken to that date. Recording the album and the subsequent tour exacerbated growing tensions and difficulties within the band, prompting Alan Wilder to quit, making this album the final with him as a band member. The ordeal had exhausted their creative output following the enormous success they had enjoyed with Violator, leading to rumours and media speculation that the band would split. Depeche Mode subsequently recovered from the experience, and released Ultra in 1997.

Songs of Faith and Devotion became Depeche Mode's first studio album to reach number one on both the UK Albums Chart and the US Billboard 200, while peaking at number one in Austria, France, Germany and Switzerland. The album received largely positive reviews from critics and peers of Depeche Mode. Band member Alan Wilder stated he felt "In Your Room" and "Walking in My Shoes" as some of the best works the band had ever done, a sentiment agreed upon by producer Mark "Flood" Ellis, who commented that "many people" involved in the project shared such sentiments. Fellow musician Gary Numan also stated that Songs of Faith and Devotion was the album that saved his career, noting; "[after listening to this album] [my] music changed dramatically. It became much darker. At School I was excused from religious instruction because I had no faith and Songs of Faith and Devotion suddenly gave me something to write about and something to be bothered about. [...] I love Depeche Mode, always will." AllMusic stated that "Songs of Faith and Devotion continues the Depeche Mode winning streak." Q also rated the album 4 out of 5 stars and later included it on their list of "In Our Lifetime: Q's 100 Best Albums" along with Violator. The NME awarded the album a score of eight out of ten. A less favourable review came from Rolling Stone, who rated the album three out of five stars.

wikipedia.org



In between Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion, a lot happened: Nirvana rewrote the ideas of what "alternative" was supposed to be, while Nine Inch Nails hit the airwaves as the most clearly Depeche-influenced new hit band around. In the meantime, the band went through some high-profile arguing as David Gahan turned into a long-haired, leather-clad rocker and pushed for a more guitar-oriented sound. Yet the odd thing about Songs of Faith and Devotion is that it sounds pretty much like a Depeche Mode album, only with some new sonic tricks courtesy of Alan Wilder and co-producer Mark "Flood" Ellis. Perhaps even odder is the fact that it works incredibly well all the same. "I Feel You," opening with a screech of feedback, works its live drums well, but when the heavy synth bass kicks in with the wailing backing vocals, even most rockers might find it hard to compete. Martin L. Gore's lyrical bent, as per the title, ponders relationships through distinctly religious imagery; while the gambit is hardly new, on songs like the centerpiece "In Your Room," the combination of personal and spiritual love blends perfectly. Outside musicians appear for the first time, including female backing singers on a couple of tracks, most notably the gospel-flavored "Condemnation" and the uilleann pipes on "Judas," providing a lovely intro to the underrated song (later covered by Tricky). "Rush" is the biggest misstep, a too obvious sign that Nine Inch Nails was a recording-session favorite to unwind to. But with other numbers such as "Walking in My Shoes" and "The Mercy in You" to recommend it, Songs of Faith and Devotion continues the Depeche Mode winning streak.

Ned Raggett - AllMusic.com



Being the least self-reflective outfit in musical history may have earned Depeche Mode its status as a bluechip singles band, but it has also rendered the group's frequent conceptual forays moot. Electronically generated post-Goth dance pop isn't a concept, it's a style, and when it works (three or four times per Depeche album), it doesn't need ideas. On this eleventh effort there's the usual talk of "darkness" and "religion" for those who get a frisson from evoking such things without actually thinking about them. Wisely, however, the band forgoes new concepts and does its tinkering musically, incorporating noisome guitar feedback, sober strings and joyful gospel moments into the pounding, percolating mix. Song to song, Faith and Devotion showcases Depeche's every, er, mode at its finest and adds a wee something — an intensifier, a surprise, the shocking but not unpleasant sound of frontman Dave Gahan actually singing. "I Feel You" has the twangy stomp of "Personal Jesus"; it's ecstatically danceable. The soulful "Walking in My Shoes" does great things with backup singers and resentment. "Get Right With Me" experiments with scratching and chiming guitars, while "One Caress" sounds like the show stopper from a lachrymose Broadway musical. Songs of Faith and Devotion documents how Depeche Mode's savvy justifies its worst instincts; like the band itself, it's gloomy, pretentious and winning.

Arion Berger - April 15, 1993
RollingStone.com



Songs Of Faith And Devotion' was released exactly twenty years ago this week. In 1993, the quartet of Dave Gahan, Martin L. Gore, Andrew Fletcher and Alan Wilder - regarded as the 'classic' Depeche Mode line-up - was a band vastly changed from their synth-pop roots. 'Violator', the 1990 album that preceded 'Songs Of Faith And Devotion', was the conclusion of a journey that took the band from Basildon boyband pop through various plunges into ever darker places, culminating in the clever, sleek stadium-friendly electronic structures of 'Violator'; girls in my school duly covered their folders and workbooks with photos of the clean-cut looking lads with leather jackets and tidy haircuts.

The Depeche Mode of 1993 arrived in the noisiest of fashions with the first single to be lifted from 'Songs Of Faith And Devotion', 'I Feel You'. From the first moments of that track it was clear that Depeche Mode wanted to put their past behind them, the track opening with seven seconds of howling feedback that some journalists compared to the soundtrack to David Lynch's Eraserhead, before a dirty blues riff from Martin L. Gore and crashing, processed live drums kicked in; organ grooves, gospel ascendancy and stirring, rousing vocals from Dave Gahan made it clear that this was a Depeche Mode who wanted to be taken very seriously indeed by the rock press.

And to go with that harder sound, with any trace of 'pure' electronics buried almost immeasurably deep beneath a murky rock cacophony, came a new image for Dave Gahan. In the downtime between 'Violator' and 'Songs Of Faith And Devotion', Dave Gahan was suddenly re-cast as the quintessential rock frontman - long hair, a body literally covered in tattoos, and all the nihilistic excesses and tendencies we have come to associate with rock royalty. The change of image somehow gave credence to Depeche Mode's new, more organic sound but it came with a dose of ballsy hyperbole from Gahan during the promotion of the album and its tour, the singer even going so far as to risibly claim that Depeche Mode were responsible for the development of grunge; his growing chemical dependencies would also lead to painfully slow progress at the recording sessions in Madrid and Hamburg, much to the frustration of the rest of the band.

Image reboot to one side, the other big change was Martin L. Gore's lyric writing. With songs like 'Condemnation' and 'Walking In My Shoes', Gore was suddenly striving for a sort of religious salvation, almost as if he was in need of redemption for some vast life of sin. Previous albums had contained songs that referenced spirituality, but here was a whole album neatly split between the album title's themes of faith and devotion. 'Condemnation', with its world weary imagery of a man accepting his punishment with bitter grace was the album's towering moment, full of hand-wringing angst, regret and disappointment. Gahan had never sounded like he does on 'Condemnation' before; his voice has a gravelly, almost slurred quality that adds to the wretchedness of the man on trial here, the slow motion wonky piano, drums and humming in the music giving this a queasy sense of muted euphoria. The combination of Alan Wilder's studio expertise and Gahan's vocal development on 'Songs Of Faith And Devotion' were the crucial elements required to execute Gore's lyrical themes; Wilder, in conjunction with the album's producer Mark "Flood" Ellis, gave Gore's songs a grainy atmosphere that was more or less the polar opposite of the far cleaner sound of 'Violator'. Grinding bass, skeketal, creeping synths, an unlikely funk guitar on 'Mercy In You', uillean pipes on 'Judas', a string orchestra on the haunting 'One Caress', scratched distorted hip-hop breaks on the affirming gospel of 'Get Right With Me', the psychedelic uplift of 'Higher Love' - all of this was virgin territory for Depeche Mode, setting 'Songs Of Faith And Devotion' a world apart from anything else they'd done. Only the electro-rock angst of 'Rush' seemed remotely related to the earlier Mode sound.

'Songs Of Faith And Devotion' is one of several pivotal albums in Depeche Mode's back catalogue, not least because it would be the catalyst for a massive change in the band. The accompanying fourteen-month global tour would see Andrew Fletcher quit the band temporarily through stress and Gore suffering from seizures brought on, in his words, by extreme exhaustion. Alan Wilder quit the band completely when the tour was over to focus on his Recoil side-project leaving a major studio gap in the band that subsequent albums have never quite filled. As for Gahan, the excesses of rock star life caught up with him savagely, the singer overdosing from a cocktail of hard drugs and actually dying for a brief few seconds, narrowly avoiding becoming another rock star fatality. That the band are still together, and back producing some of their strongest songs yet, remains something of a surprise after the career pinnacle that was 'Songs Of Faith And Devotion' and the ensuing strain it caused - but thankfully they are.

Mat Smith - ClashMusic.com
 

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