It gives a good review to the new Depeche Mode album:
Depeche Mode achieves a tricky balance on “Sounds of the Universe”: Its 12th full-length album fits neatly into its discography while sounding contemporary and building on the trio’s lean electro-rock.
The Times, however, isn’t so sure, and suggests that the new record sounds anything but contemporary.
Here the band — Dave Gahan, Martin Gore, Andy Fletcher — is in familiar orbit: rigorous songwriting, largely by Mr. Gore; melancholic and desperate singing by Mr. Gahan; and propulsive production that’s accented with industrial friction. But while it lacks the fragility of 1984’s “Some Great Reward” or the earned attitude of 1990’s “Violator,” it’s unmistakably an attempt at revisiting the past, admirable either as an act of defiant stubbornness or tenacious commitment.
(Whether it’s Steely Dan or Chris Isaak, I for one don’t mind when a band doesn’t feel a great need to change its sound—if they’re doing what they do well, does it really matter?)
What’s interesting about the Times review is mostly the fact that there is one—in past years the paper would never have considered DM worthy of consideration. Proof that if you stick around long enough, attention must be paid.
USA Today gives the album three out of four stars, saying:
Pain, anguish and regret flood the grooves. That’s a universal sound.
So true.
Oh, and the San Francisco Chronicle (wait-that still exists?) likes the album as well.
On “Sounds of the Universe” the British trio is reinvigorated, offering a thoroughly contemporary spin on its sleazy electronic rock with bad-tempered songs such as “Fragile Tension” and “Miles Away.” The music is fuzzier, less defined and, on a handful of tracks, unruly enough to feel like a reaction to the efficiency and order that came before it.
The Yankees won yesterday, calming the city’s tabloids, which went postal (The Stinkees!) after the team was embarrassed by the Cleveland Indians, 22-4, on Saturday. That Chien-Ming Wang is a problem; one suspects his pitching troubles are psychological, and that is not good.
But win or lose, the Yanks still can’t sell those $2600 seats.
Paid attendance was announced as 43,068, but once again there were many empty seats near the field, including entire vacant rows in the lower deck behind the Yankees’ dugout.
The Yankees are spinning this, with team pres Randy Levine saying most of those “premium seats” have been sold and ticketholders might have been inside the Stadium, in a bar or club. As if. You don’t spend $2600 on a seat and then not sit there.
(And Levine’s claim shows the problem of selling tickets for such ridiculous sums—they’re often stacked with fat cats who don’t care about the game, in part because their company paid for the seats, so they don’t pay attention, talk on their Blackberries, spend time in luxury boxes, and are just generally crummy fans.)
The Cleveland whupping pointed up a huge problem for the team. Who could possibly spend that much money on tickets and feel they’d gotten their money’s worth when the game was over before the third inning? You’d feel asinine, cheated—and indeed, there are some signs that the price-gouging nature of the new stadium is leaving a bitter taste in many fans’ mouths. The team also has a policy of not letting fans from cheaper seats move to the better ones in later innings, no matter how many seats sit empty. So that pisses people off too—especially when there are lots of great empty seats right in front of you.
(Obviously, value is a relative term here, because even a good game wouldn’t justify $2600, but still….)
These empty seats are going to be a season-long embarrassment for the Yankees, but what can they do? They can’t reduce prices mid-season; that would infuriate those stupid enough to have paid the exorbitant ones. And they can’t give the tickets away for the same reason.
I wonder how much the team will charge for those seats next year—$300? $500?
That’s the title of a very sharp-tongued and quite smart op-ed by economics writer Naomi Klein in today’s Washington Post.
Summers, she argues, reflects the cult of the big brain, and we’ve all seen the troubles that can come from joining that cult.
The criticisms of President Obama’s chief economic adviser are well known. He’s too close to Wall Street. And he’s a frightful bully, of both people and countries. Still, we’re told we shouldn’t care about such minor infractions. Why? Because Summers is brilliant, and the world needs his big brain.
Klein goes on to use some unintentionally hilarious/tragicomic statements Summers has made in the past against him, and concludes….
And that’s the problem with Larry. For all his appeals to absolute truths, he has been spectacularly wrong again and again. He was wrong about not regulating derivatives. Wrong when he helped kill Depression-era banking laws, turning banks into too-big-to-fail welfare monsters. And as he helps devise ever more complex tricks and spends ever more taxpayer dollars to keep the financial casino running, he remains wrong today.
This is a short, stark piece of writing, and all the more compelling for it.
Since it is Sunday, let us commune with Depeche Mode. Good news today: Entertainment Weekly spits in the face of Rolling Stone and gives Sounds of the Universe a solid review.
Leah Greenblatt writes,
Even those born in a bat cave would have a tough time sustaining the level of broody nocturnal drama that England’s dark lords of dance-rock have maintained for nearly 30 years. Somehow, though, on Sounds of the Universe they still sound genuinely inspired, especially on tracks like the fragile ”In Sympathy” and the hypnotic ”Peace.” Lead single ”Wrong” revisits classic black-heart Mode, but there’s something gentler here, too — not so much a softening as a graceful evolution. B+
And more good news: If you want to hear the new album, it’s streaming here. A bit of a pain, as you have to click anew to start each song, but still…free is free.
But sometimes we must pass through darkness before we come to light, and the mid-1990s, during which the band recorded two albums, Ultra and Songs of Faith and Devotion, were dark indeed. Dave Gahan had broken up with his wife and moved from England to LA, where a new wife reportedly got him into heroin. Martin Gore was drinking heavily. Andrew Wilder grew so disenchanted with the band’s direction that, in 1995, he quit. But it all really came to a head on the notorious 1994 “Devotional” tour, where Dave was on heroin pretty much every night and, I once read, Martin was drinking three bottles of wine before he could even take the stage. Gore could function, sort of, with his problem. Gahan could not with his.
“It was an escape,” he has said. “Heroin meant that I didn’t have to deal with my
feelings of being an outsider, an oddball. With heroin I didn’t have
to deal with anything.”
When NME’s Gavin Martin interviewed Depeche Mode in September 1993,
during the Devotional Tour, he found Gahan very obviously ill, his arms
bruised and scratched. Martin was later told that this was as a result
of the singer being bitten and scratched by fans. In interviews, Gahan
denied that he had a drug dependency problem, although he once admitted
that he drank too much.
So out of it was Gahan that he used to hallucinate that he was talking to a doll of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz.
It was a present someone had given to me, he said recently. In my drug paranoia, he was the person I spent most time talking to. I think, in th end, I shot him. …What he was saying wasn’t nice so I shot him. I had a few guns back then.
In 1995, Gahan was rushed to the hospital after slashing his wrists with a razor blade, though he later denied that he was seriously trying to kill himself. Then, less than a year later, Gahan died—for two minutes.
Responding to an emergency 911 call at 1.15am on May
28, from an unnamed woman saying that she was Gahan’ roommate, deputies
of the West Hollywood Sheriff’ department and paramedics knocked down
the door of Gahan’s room at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, Beverly Hills, Los
Angeles. They found the 34-year-old Depeche Mode singer unconscious in
the bathroom. They also found a “sizeable amount” of what they believed
to be a mixture of heroin and cocaine, as well as drug paraphernalia.
At some point Gahan’s heart stopped and paramedics couldn’t restart it for 120 seconds.
Your heart stopped in 1996 after you OD’d on a speedball. Do you remember anything from that near-death experience?
What I really felt was this overwhelming feeling of whatever it was I was doing to myself was clearly wrong. And all I really saw was blackness. I was kind of a goner. That was the start of me trying to do something different with my life.
He has since said that he wakes up nightly at 4:15 AM, the moment when he died. Which is sort of creepy and beautiful at the same time.
Gahan entered rehab in 1996 and did eventually clean up; Gore stopped drinking entirely three years ago, and in an interview in the new issue of Q magazine (not online, I don’t think), he says:
Stopping has been really good .I was just missing out on so much. There are whole trips I don’t remember.….
Nonetheless, Ultra and Songs of Faith of Devotion contain some great music. Some samples…
From Ultra comes “It’s No Good”….
From Songs of Faith and Devotion, this is “I Feel You”—really one of the great DM songs, IMHO…
Should Harvard spend its way out of the depression, making new investments like some businesses?
That’s what Tom Keane, a freelance writer, argues in the Boston Globe magazine.
A reported 30 percent drop in the value of its endowment seems to have thrown the university into a tizzy. Granted, that’s a lot. But previous years had shown a dramatic rise in the value of the endowment, and the newest drop still leaves Harvard with around $24 billion — about as much as it had in 2005 and almost double what the university had 10 years ago, when it first announced its expansion plans.
…This isn’t to diminish Harvard’s travails. But it’s been around for 373 years and survived revolutions, wars, and other recessions. It’s prominent and important enough that it needs to do more than play victim; it needs to be part of the solution.
I am unconvinced by Mr. Keane’s argument….for one thing, he doesn’t note that the amount of money the university now takes from the endowment is something like double the last time the endowment was around 26 billion (which is to say, $37 billion minus 30%).
Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.
—Today’s NYT.
Where does one start? Those sentences are heartbreaking in so many ways, such a powerful metaphor for what torture—and, more broadly, George Bush and Dick Cheney—did to our nation. Under the guise of making us safe, they inflicted enormous damage upon the country, and it will take so long to recover.
But we have at least started that process, and really, we should say a prayer every day for the health of our new president.