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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Incomplete overview but lots of great music for the casual (?) DM fan, November 20, 2006
Music: 5 Stars; Compilation: 3 Stars
Depeche Mode's first album was released 1981, and the band celebrated their 25 years in the music business this year by touring extensively behind last year's "Playing the Angel" album, their 11th studio album. Depeche Mode has issued many, many hit singles over the years which has been compiled in the "Singles 81>85" and "Singles 86>98" compilations. Now comes the very first career-spanning "best of".
"The Best of Depeche Mode, Volume 1" (18 tracks; 74 min.) tries to capture the essence of the band, and indeed a lot of great music is on here: "Personal Jesus", "Emjoy the Silence", "People Are People" and many other hits are on here. There are 3 songs from the most recent 2 albums ("Dream On", "Suffer Well" and "Precious") and one new song, an okay "Martyr" (from the "Playing the Angel" sessions.) Two issues: (1) the music suffers from not being sequenced chronologically: from "See You" straight into "It's No Good"? Not good!; (2) There are a LOT of equally essential hits that are missing. Just to name a few: "Policy of Truth", "Barrell of a Gun", "World In My Eyes", "Leave in Silence", "Get the Balance Right", "It's Called a Heart" and on and on...
The question then is who this compilations is intended for. Surely the more devoted DM fans will not be very interested in this (just buy "Martyr" as a single or as a download). So it's for the casual Depeche Mode fan, who just wants to have the best-known songs in one place. This assumes there are many casual DM fans... As mentioned already, there are a lot of hits missing, but teasingly this compilation is subtitled "Volume 1" so at some point this will be corrected (presumably with the inclusion again of one new track).
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Starting Point, September 23, 2008
DM have gone through many distinct phases since their inception at the beginning of the 1980's. This compilation CD, while not "perfect" by the standards of serious fanatics--how could it be?--is a good place to start when you're just trying to get a feel for the band's sound.
Unlike the two singles compilations released in 1998, the tracks here are sequenced to showcase the band's diverse history rather than a chronological progression. "Personal Jesus" was not DM's first single, but it did become their most recognizable hit of all time. It also grandfathered a series of songs that pay homage to it later in the band's career. Try listening to the bluesy guitar riff in "Jesus" and then "I Feel You," "Dream On," "Suffer Well," and "Martyr." The lineage should be clear even to casual listeners.
But there are of course other strains of Depeche Mode, and that's why "Just Can't Get Enough" is such a shock when sequenced back to back with "Personal Jesus." Who knew that the same band was capable of bouncy bubble gum pop on the one hand, and a monument to God, Elvis, and Kraftwerk on the other? That's the trick to Depeche Mode: it lies somewhere between Johnny Cash and A-ha, biblical allusion and trendy disposability, tortured guitars and Moog synthesizers. No wonder many people don't really know what to think about this band. There are identifiable waypoints along this tangled path: try sequencing the sincerity of "See You" and the menace of "Never Let Me Down Again" between those polar opposites, and maybe you get something close to a straight line from point A to B.
For a while DM was about pushing the buttons of the BBC. Nowadays, when a song about being bi-curious hits number one on the charts, "Master and Servant" might seem quite acceptably deviant. But in 1984 it was a kind of firebomb tossed on pop music, and when you consider other politically- and culturally-charged salvos of the time such as "Everything Counts," "People Are People," and "Strangelove," you can see why Depeche Mode has sometimes been synonymous with subversion.
But when all is said and done, what might be best about Depeche Mode is its pensiveness, its navel-gazing, its proclivity for being romantic and emotionally distant at the same time. Hence "Enjoy the Silence" and "Shake the Disease." "I'm not going down on my knees," Martin Gore writes, "begging you to adore me." And he still manages to come off as hopelessly in love and terrified of being hopelessly out of love all over again. Which leads quite naturally to the pained confessions of weakness and defeat in "Walking in My Shoes" and "Precious." It's never cut and dried, never direct and easy for this band when it comes to attachments, and that's a big part of its lasting appeal.
There aren't many acts in music that can display such longevity and varied success in its catalogue, but Depeche Mode is one of them. And that's the story this disc tells as effectively as it realistically could in less than eighty minutes.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Good Compiliation That Was Handled With Care, November 17, 2006
The problem with Best Ofs, especially single disc offerings from bands with a long career, is the fact that some really great songs are dropped in favor of some not as great songs. The fact that there is a volume 1 next to the name makes the fact that some songs that should be on here, like Blasphemous Rumors, a lot easier to accept.
However, this, like all Best Ofs, isn't aimed for the established fan. It's aimed for the neophyte, and a different set of standards has to be used.
First off, all of the big songs are accounted for here. So the songs that people who don't listen to Depeche Mode but would be aware of are presented here. Secondly, is the album a good listen. And it is. Now, some may complain that the singles aren't presented in chronological order, but for Depeche Mode, it really helps the cause to show that they were a consistently great band. The fact that early, bright, poppy singles like "Just Can't Get Enough" can hold their own against the later, more mature singles like "Personal Jesus" only emphasizes the growth and their initial greatness.
For the old fans of Depeche Mode, what is here to entice you? Well first off, the tracks from Playing the Angel have been remastered. In case you didn't hear Playing the Angel, it was a really good album that was mastered very poorly - the CD was mastered too hottly, giving the album a very muddy sound. Now, the two songs from that album sound a lot cleaner and has a much moodier atmosphere than a muddy one.
And Martyr, the new single, is a fun song that shows the band still has life in them.
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