The elders of the class will remember: for many years, every David Bowie album was hailed as “the best since ‘Scary monsters’& rdquor;, alluding to the 1980 album that represented the end of his golden and ‘avantgarde’ era, before ‘Let’s dance’ (1983) precipitated him into the commercial arena. A song between promotional and desperate which was applied, for example, to ‘Black tie white noise’ (1993), but also to ‘Outside’ (1995), and immediately afterwards to ‘Earthling’ (1997), and of course to ‘Heathen’ (2002), and it would be missing more, to the twilight ‘Blackstar’ (2016).
whereupon, that sentence, which annulled itself from time to time, It said more of our anxiety to perceive a Bowie masterpiece, and participate in the state of grace of the genius in real time, than in a certifiable creative bonanza of the artist. Although such discs were all remarkable upwards, it must be said.
The new of Depeche Mode, ‘Memento Mori’, has aroused similar impulses. It talks about your “Best album since ‘Ultra’” (1997), or “of the 21st century& rdquor;, or, forcing the seams a little more, “of this millennium& rdquor;. Panegyrics run through the networks: “great record & rdquor ;. And although it is possible that, indeed, this work rises above the average of its recent era, it is a bit embarrassing to compare it with a ‘Music for the masses’ (1987) or a ‘Violator’ (1990). We’ll see how many of their songs will last in the group’s repertoire in three or four years.
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These days, another band of the same generation, U2, has been met with an equally unanimous reception, and a similar lexical furor, only in reverse. Of course, ‘Songs of surrender’, with its meticulous recreation of bygone songs, hits hard from the start, but is it as calamitous as it comes to say? On Metacritic, where the Depeche Mode album scores 85 out of 100, U2 stays at 66, which is not a fail, but a high pass.
What is most difficult for us is to agree that a record has attractive aspects, even without being a masterpiece, or that it is weak compared to the previous ones, but that it is listenable at least for those who sympathize with the artist’s historical record. The rules of social networks reward expeditious headlines: “genius & rdquor; or “disaster & rdquor;”, “the best since…” or “the worst & rdquor;. And ‘Songs of surrender’, an album of demystifying ‘remakes’, surely thought by the group knowing that it is a minor work, it has so many things against it that it has been inevitable to see it touched and sunk, even before the day of its publication.