Cover of “Playing The Angel” by Depeche Mode
Anton Corbijn gave Depeche Mode a kind of UFO stage, and Martin Gore walked around like the character on the album cover: in a space bird costume.
The four singles worked. With “A Pain That I’m Used To”, but especially “John The Revelator”, DeMo evoked the old “Black Celebration” feeling of board hardness. No one else could get past Gahan’s voice. Encouraged by his solo albums, at the age of 43 he insisted on including self-written songs for the first time. “Suffer Well” doesn’t have to hide behind Gore’s songs.
Of course, like all later albums, “Playing The Angel” also contains cheese. “The Sinner In Me,” “Nothing’s Impossible,” and “Lilian.” “Precious” is reminiscent of “Enjoy The Silence,” which can be very nice – or very bad, as the better song resonates. “Precious” Gore was important as a song because it describes the personal crisis of his time, separation from his wife and neglect of his child.
With “Macro”, Gore devotes himself, as he later did in “Sounds Of The Universe”, to the singularity: “See the microcosm / In macro vision / One universal celebration / One evolution / One creation.” In “The Darkest Star” he goes a little further, and it is perhaps the best of all the songs that have not been performed live to date: an ending like the pull into a black hole.
The text comes from the list “All Depeche Mode albums in the ranking”