Memento Mori stands with the best of their career, a potent reminder that the underlying meaning of the Latin expression is not to fear death, but to treasure what life we have.
"Article published in The Telegraph. Author: Neil McCormick."
When your lead singer is a recovered heroin addict who has had so many brushes with death (including heart attacks, suicide attempts and overdoses) that paramedics nicknamed him “The Cat”, calling your 15th album Memento Mori (Latin for “remember death”) might seem like bravado. As it transpired, it was not Dave Gahan who was tempting fate. Songs had been demoed and the album title already chosen when Depeche Mode keyboardist and founder member Andy Fletcher died of a heart attack in May last year, weeks before the band were due to convene in a recording studio for the first time since 2016. Fletch was the matiest, cheeriest and least starry member of the Mode, his sudden death at 60 a shock to everyone. “He was supposed to outlive us all,” lamented Gahan.
The surviving duo of Gahan and multi-instrumentalist and principal songwriter Martin Gore have soldiered on, turning Memento Mori into an elegy for their lost bandmate and hymn to their own endurance. It probably helped that it was written under the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic by aging stars turning 60, so themes of mortality, doubt and faith were already deeply embedded within the work. The result is the most sombre and beautiful album of their career.
“Everything seems hollow / When you watch another angel die,” Gahan croons across a burbling stream of synths on Wagging Tongues, the jauntiness of the sounds offsetting the sentimentality of the lyric. “I’m ready for the final pages / Kiss goodbye to all my earthly cages,” sings Martin Gore (his clear tenor always an interesting contrast to Gahan’s grave baritone) on the lush and elegiac Soul With Me. “Heavens dreaming thoughtless thoughts my friend / We know we’ll be ghosts again,” sing Gahan and Gore together on Ghosts Again, where the driving momentum of electro bass, treated guitars and soaring synths convey a sense of fond adieu rather than morbid sadness.
We have long got used to the twilight of the rock and roll gods. Stranger to contemplate that even synth pop is old now, electronic music once held synonymous with science fiction futurism. Depeche Mode were amongst the first to turn the krautrock experimentalism of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and David Bowie into chart pop, the Basildon boys quickly morphing from fresh-faced new romantics to embrace the darker gravitas of Goth and industrial rock to become the world’s first stadium electro band.
Members came and went but Fletcher was the glue who bound them together through his clubbable personality rather than musical skill. He was never crucial to the Mode sound, however, so as a rump duo (augmented by producer James Ford with some co-writing by Richard Butler of The Psychedelic Furs) nothing has really changed. Depeche have always sounded fantastic, with arrangements of clean, hard, crunching, whirring synths and distorting guitars underpinning a melodiousness rare in the electronic milieu.
What is heartening about this album is that they don’t sound jaded or defeated, nor are they trying too hard to craft hits or keep pace with the times. They have conjured a collection of really strong songs about big subjects, delivered with sensitivity and conviction. Memento Mori stands with the best of their career, a potent reminder that the underlying meaning of the Latin expression is not to fear death, but to treasure what life we have.
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