Depeche Mode – Delta Machine

One of my favourite DM albums. It's a complete masterpiece. The pressing sounds not as good as Spirit though.

I think this is a masterpiece of DM. The LP sounds great.
This music got the groove and mood! SLOW ist my absolute favorite, followed by BROKEN

Good sound on this album and vinyl pressing, far better than "Playing the Angel", which is nevertheless a better album. Musically "Delta Machine" is far from my favourite Depeche Mode, partly because I don't think that southern blues suits them that well - honestly I find it cringe to hear Dave Gahan trying to sing like BB King over slide guitar. But at least this time they got the production right.

I quite like Delta Machine. Good tour too. Martin sang Leave In Silence !
Anyway, like all post Ultra DM albums it needs pruning. Chop off Slow, Soft Touch, and Soothe My Soul (Awful) and what’s left flows quite nicely.
The bonus tracks don’t do much for me at all.

Any idea how to differentiate this from the Europe 2016 repress? They seem to be identical, according to the pics. I just got one, I'd like to catalogue it, but I can't determine if it's this one, or the 2016 one...

I still crank "Sooth My Sole to this day. The rest of the album is ok, I do like Secrets

After a year and a half, I still do not know what to make of this record.
Great title, great artwork and a bunch of songs that could be much better.
The best tracks for me are: "Angel" and "All That's Mine". Real DM school here, back to old times!
My greatest frustration was production decision on shoving an overloud distorting guitar on "Soothe My Soul" chorus.
Mastering is much better than previous 2 albums. I hope they keep turning the volume down for more dynamics!

All I know is that I will definitely stop collecting DM material if Ben Hillier is back again.

Well - last year when I listened it first I did not get into it.
I thought it's a piece of boring, uninspired dullness that no-one ever really needs these times. It thought, guys, quit DM and leave your glorious past as is, without distracting your glory with new oeuvres.

Maybe the expectations. Even though I thought I don't have any expectations anymore from their records post 'Ultra'. Maybe because I know them from their first release and I felt disappointed by the most stuff the last decade. But still I always gave them a try... call it melancholic nostalgia... heroes MUST be GOOD... whatever.

It took me some re-iterations of 'giving it another try'.

And now - more than a year later I went more calm to give it a complete run again - three times in a row. A short break. And then I let the vinyl roll the whole evening 'til three o'clock in the morning.

I LISTENED without prejudice then. And I it to say that it grew and it settled and it touched me and now, now I need to say that I am quite impressed by this record. Very difficult to explain and not sure what happened inbetween. So today I find it's a strong album.

My first impression is not good. It has all the trademark dismal DM mood, which has become a tiring, full-on paranoia at this point. It's a dark album, but what DM album isn't?

The biggest problem is that it's also dull. Very few tracks grabbed me. Too many similar tracks. It's even less interesting than Sounds of the Universe.

"Violator" is both, a masterpiece and the curse of DM - although I at the time, I didn't like it on first listen. Especially "Personal Jesus"... but then, it started growing on me. The sound was heavier, but they kept their electronic pulse and treated it with great care. Maybe it was still the bloody 80s, Alan Wilder, François K. and/or Flood, cannot tell - "Violator" was the perfect record, made at the right time. I respect them for not repeating the formula with "Songs of Faith and Devotion" onwards, but to this day, while SOFAD remains by far their most mature (and also most "rock-ish") album, Depeche began to fade in and out of their own focus. Not that they made any wrong moves - with "Ultra", "Exciter" and "Playing the Angel", the post-Wilder trio continued to grow, but they also continued to drag along.

My personal problem with DM is their ongoing visual aesthetic predictability ever after, that's remained for 20+ years, ever since they started working with Anton Corbijn. I agree that Corbijn's assistance at first was a necessary injection of fresh blood (and I love his sharp grainy b/w photography) - Corbijn truly helped repairing the group's public image (teenage posters, videos, memorabilia, etc.) at the time - but the sleeve for "Violator" was/is the very last visual experiment that truly worked, perfectly encapsulating the beauty of the group's morbid and subversive side with that of a mainstream, omnipresent electro-supergroup.

Of course, by accepting Corbijn's visual side of things (already during "Black Celebration"), DM started to play safe more and more, and in a way it somehow started to affect (or present) their music part of the story as well. Gone is the grandiose epic photography/design (previously courtesy of Brian Griffin/Martyn Atkins), gone is the tasty subversiveness and morbidity of their pop-appeal in that context... what remained was just the dull "darkness" of a cliché that is "sex, drugs & rock'n'roll". In their case, it's been coined a phrase "Pain and suffering in various tempos". Even though I didn't lose my respect for most of their ongoing music adventures, and continued to listen to everything post-Violator (although more of curiosity than anticipation), their previous album "Sounds Of the Universe" was an insult and remains the one I love to hate tremendously, and blame it for everything monstrously predictable about DM in recent years.

As I said, while "Violator" encapsulated the beauty of DM of the time (and the rose symbol was the pinnacle of this audio-visual success), SOTU encapsulated the sadness and what turned into an unimaginative audio-visual (electro-blues) franchise ever since SOFAD - and the one that made me really suspicious about "Delta Machine" (especially when I saw the sleeve design, which even managed to overshadow the dull visual dilettantism of SOTU - and of course, the moment "Angel" and "Heaven" leaked online, I felt very sad - considering the whole of the new album, these two songs remain the weakest of the lot, despite their "energy", "blues" and/or "soul" factor).

Surprisingly, however, the new album managed to resurrect some of the grace DM had back in their ultimate glory days - unlike SOTU, "Delta Machine" is a decent return to form, just as it is a sort of a farewell (from Mute to Columbia, to start with). They grew old, and they don't hide the fact, itting they gave their best, learning from past mistakes by falling into music industry traps around them - got badly hurt at one point but stood up and fought their own demons along the way. The pathetic side in of "soul", "love", "angels" and "heaven" became too audible, but musically they still struggle/manage to keep some of the balance between DM they once were and DM they are now.

Four tracks from the new album are amazing ("Secret To the End", "My Little Universe", "The Child Inside" and "Broken" which is dangerously close to a Marc Almond's "A Lover Spurned" re-write, only without trumpets and with delicious hint of "Blasphemous Rumours"), while the rest is, let's say, respectfully "generic" minimal electro-rock DM stuff of recent times. Whether it's good or bad thing, each fan will decide for himself.

My personal impression is, some of this could have been an even better offering if released as Martin's solo album ("The Child Inside", the album's finest moment, is the most beautiful example and one of his best songs to date, where the electro-blues thing shines with inmost beauty), although Dave's vocals are impressively strong and resonant all the way through the album. Of course, neither Martin nor Dave, will ever manage to escape from eachother, let alone the DM stigma - it is a deserved institution with loads of past masterpieces and their decent immitations to choose from.