viridian5, posts by tag: depeche mode - LiveJournal

While I was walking outside at 4 am, like I sometimes do, I got to see the skinny crescent moon with a bright Venus as an orange arc of light beneath it. Wasn't expecting it but I was glad to get it. (Usually when there are night sky events, my area has clouds or rain, not the clarity we had last night, with more stars visible than usual.)

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This sounds and looks interesting but ticket prices, especially for iMAX, are too rich for my blood so no.




In cinemas & IMAX® with limited screenings beginning October 28.
Get tickets at https://www.DepecheModeM.com.

DEPECHE MODE: M is a cinematic journey into the heart of Mexican culture's relationship with death, framed by the iconic performances of Depeche Mode during their 2023 Memento Mori tour. Conceived and directed by award-winning Mexican filmmaker Fernando Frías, the film captures the band's three sold-out shows in Mexico City, attended by over 200,000 fans, blending concert footage with interpretive interstitials and archival material. DEPECHE MODE: M celebrates the band's global influence while delving into the profound connection between music, mortality, and Mexican tradition — a sacred meeting point where pain, memory, joy, and dance dissolve into one another, blurring into something profoundly and beautifully human.

I Dont Know How But They Found Me has a new song, "What Love?", with a music video out on YouTube... for an album, Gloom Division, that won't come out until February. Though for now you can buy just this one song as an MP3 on Amazon.com. What are they doing? If they intend to make their fans buy song after song individually until the album comes out--and then also buy the album, step 3: Profit?--I'm not going along with it. Just another way Dallon Weekes is trying my patience.

Though at least the music video is nearly a music video, as opposed to Depeche Mode's "music video" for "My Favorite Stranger," which is just one of their wives lightly disguised as male while taking a walk in black and white.

I have about 29 new window display photos from Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's, and Kleinfeld Bridal, as well as three shots of family cats Treble and Kiwi Herman, up at my Flickr.

Kleinfeld Bridal again had a concept that it took me a bit of thinking to understand--the embedded thumbnail is of one of their two windows--but then I looked at the painting in the purple box and got it. She's painting Ken, and these mannequins are in Barbie doll boxes.

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I borrowed Depeche Mode's new album, Memento Mori, from the library and I'm loving it, to my relief. When they performed "Ghosts Again" live on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert they'd looked and sounded old and tired, so I worried, especially since an original band member, Andy Fletcher, had died in May 2022. Hilariously, Colbert released a clip of them doing "Personal Jesus" live on the same show only to YouTube, and there they sounded and did great.

For those wondering, Memento Mori is kind of in the vein of their 2013 Delta Machine album, rather dark and with a lot of bass, full-bodied, synthy and with some industrial touches. I hear a bit of 2017's Spirit at times too.

If someone had me in the 1980s that I'd still be listening to and enjoying new music from Depeche Mode 40 years later, my mind would've been boggled.

I put a few more different sunset photos, three from July, on my Flickr.

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I'm so, so ready for summer to be over. I'm sick of feeling sweaty and gross all the time, my body and head deal with heat and humidity very badly, and my hair is frizzy 85% of the time these days.

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I think these National Parks Notebooks (Set of 3) look really cool, but the interior pages being grid paper means I'd have nothing to use them for.

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Whoa, what? "NASA will crash a spacecraft into a 525-foot-wide asteroid in September. Here's how to watch it." Armageddon in RL?

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Lately, when I'm playing the radio while driving I have three stations I use: the alternative station, the whatever is currently popular station, and CBS FM, which is the oldies station that now plays mostly songs from the '80s and creeping a bit into the '90s. I almost had a heart attack when I got confused and thought CBS FM was playing Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" when I actually had it set to the alternative station. No, just no.

In my defense, I've heard CBS FM play the Beastie Boys' "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)" as one of their Friday 5 pm "work week is over, hooray" songs so.... (Beastie Boys on my oldies station? It's more likely than you think!)

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I often put my music player on Shuffle but randomly decided to listen to a few albums in their entirety. Depeche Mode's Ultra immediately and vividly brings me back to a certain time in my life and fandoms. I'd forgotten that Dave Gahan sings a lot of it at a comfortable place for my lower range on that album--he tends to sing in a baritone--where usually I sing higher harmony (or just Martin Gore's canonical harmony). I'd forgotten that I enjoy that little rumbling feeling I get in my chest doing it.

Andy Fletcher, founding member and keyboardist of Depeche Mode, has died at the age of 60. I can't help but wonder what this will mean for the band, whose last album was 2017's Spirit.

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I had a dream where I was various members of Schwarz at different times wrecking my way through a tall Eszett building. Destroying massive windows inside a dining hall with my mind telekinetically as Nagi was very satisfying.

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Pokémon GO has a lot of really ridiculous clothing options for the avatars but also some that really work for me. I wish I could describe the things I like better. Asymmetry, decorative seams, offset elements, cutouts, combination of elements and textures, embellishments, metal pieces. (Some contemporary athletic clothing actually has some of the detailing I like, but it tends to be pricy.) I like lace, but not if it feels scratchy on the skin. Though, due to my neurological quirks, I personally can't wear tight-fitting clothing, especially if it's tight and close at the neck, shoulders, and joints.

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We had two days of warmth closer to what we should be getting for spring, so I went out today to take advantage of the 76 °F/24 °C temperature before it drops to 43 °F/6 °C tomorrow and continues in a similar vein for the week. I did a 2.3 mile walk today and enjoyed the riot of children and dogs also enjoying today's weather at Juniper Valley Park. This winter has been way too long and isolating, but New York City doesn't seem to do distinct seasons any more. I hope it doesn't get so cold that it messes with all the trees that are just starting to bloom.

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The "Dreams" meme inspired me to borrow Fleetwood Mac's Rumours from the library. The songs on it I dislike on it I dislike but the others I love, and not just in a nostalgic way. "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" is too associated with my disappointments with the Clintons--you have to have been alive in the '90s to get that one--but I'm all in on "The Chain," "Dreams," "Go Your Own Way," and "Gold Dust Woman." You'll miss a lot on these unless you listen through headphones/earbuds because there are subtleties and bits you'll miss otherwise. The thing about a band that includes so many singers is that when they choose to harmonize on the choruses it's amazing.

The more than one singer thing is also interesting in a sing along way, like when I'm singing along with Depeche Mode and sometimes singing with David, sometimes with Martin, and sometimes with Martin's part (with me sometimes adding more Martin harmony pieces) in a song David is lead on since their ranges are different.

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I haven't posted anything lately, but I've been writing the newest fic in the And Yet, Hayama Hayato Can Still Surprise series and it's going long.

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For the most part I enjoyed "World Enough and Time" and "The Doctor Falls," with their many nods to old-school Doctor Who, some of which I didn't even catch until I read the comments left on the episode reviews at the AV Club. ( Collapse )

I'm going to miss Capaldi so much. He deserved better writing throughout his tenure.

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I've been trying to bring my physical condition up by walking a lot more, adding miles to my weekly tally, and using finding and gaining stuff in PoGO as an excuse. With the heat, which gets worse in my bedroom at night and into early morning, my head has been hurting enough, sometimes even with air conditioning on, that I haven't been sleeping so I go out for walks at night. ( Collapse )

My body being my body, all this walking has hurt my right knee. My body hates exercise so much. I've gotten an exercise high maybe five times in my entire life, and three of them were from playing court hockey so hard and exuberantly in gym classes in high school that my face went magenta. I don't feel better or stronger no matter how much I work at it.

I'm not appreciating all the many itchy insect bites my long outdoor walks have gotten me either. Apparently I'm delicious.

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Speaking of Spirit, I'm enjoying it a lot, though it took a few listens to really register with me, something that's happened with the last few Depeche Mode albums. In fact, my favorite song on it is one that made no impression on me in the first listen, "Cover Me." (I enjoy the sound of it but also, strangely, how specific the starting words are: "I've felt better / I've been up all night / I can feel it coming / The morning light / The air is so cold here / It's so hard to breathe / We better take cover / Will you cover me?...") The songs kind of... bloom over repetitions. The album is a great listen on headphones, when all the complexities in the soundscape are more obvious. Their repertoire here includes old rock and roll, some country guitars, and some stuff that sounds like old movie backgrounds. I wonder if the return of the "Personal Jesus"-style guitars on "Where's the Revolution" is meant as a deliberate link for lyrical content.

Reviewers on Amazon.com are fairly split on Spirit, some for reasons I sneer at. Some of the haters are angry at how political some of the songs are--a few might as well be Brexit (and Possibly Trump Fans): the Album--as if the band hasn't always put out a political song now and then. There are complaints that it's dark and not really fast and bright; dudes, this is Depeche Mode! And the thing that makes me sneer the hardest: Depeche Mode isn't putting out exactly the same music it did in the 1980s.

But Spirit has a better overall rating than Linkin Park's newest album, One More Light, which I'm less surprised by since OML is very pop and barely rock at all. Also, LP fans hating on the new direction of their latest album over at Amazon is a long-running show, one I enjoy in a sadistic way. I'm not thrilled by how Top 40 the album sounds either, especially since the... caramel of Chester Bennington's singing voice stands out best to me over harsh music while pop sounds with his voice is just too much caramel. Plus, there's a Chipmunk voice effect that briefly shows up in a few songs that wears on my nerves. But Linkin Park still makes music I love to sing along to. By this point, fans should no longer be surprised that Linkin Park isn't putting out nu metal songs since it's been about ten years of that now.

But considering the number of people who keep saying Depeche Mode should put out the same music as they did 30 years ago, Linkin Park probably shouldn't expect their fans' complaints to end either.

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Rolling Stone has some good picks on its "100 Best Albums of the Nineties," though of course there are some artists and genres on it I don't listen to. One cool thing is that alternative music in the 90s was often high profile enough that Rolling Stone counted some albums from it, but they didn't get it all so here are some of my choices they didn't get:

• Ultra by Depeche Mode. I appreciate Violator already being on RS's list, but Ultra is great too, as well as being DM's introduction to their post-80s direction. (Songs of Faith and Devotion was pretty good but I felt it was too strongly influenced by all the guitar rock going on at the time, a bit of the identity crisis a lot of 80s bands went through at the time and thus not totally Depeche Mode, proven to me by how they backed off from this sound somewhat in albums to come.)


• Version 2.0 by Garbage


• The Three Calamities by Switchblade Symphony (Bread and Jam for Frances had some really strong songs but also some I thought were just unnecessary filler, so I can't say it's a best album.)


• Darkest Days by Stabbing Westward


• Ænima by Tool


• Vision Thing by the Sisters of Mercy


• Visual Audio Sensory Theater by VAST


• Dirt by Alice in Chains


• Mexican Moon by Concrete Blonde


• Concentration by Machines of Loving Grace


• Prick by Prick


• Virtuosity soundtrack


• Strange Days soundtrack

Can an EP like Broken by Nine Inch Nails count?

I'm sure I've forgotten a few (and some I wanted to include actually came out in 2000 or 2001). What have Rolling Stone and I missed/what are some of your choices?

I was amused: "They're Made Out of Meat" by Terry Bisson

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I am bitterly amused by something else. In the amazon.com reviews for Depeche Mode's latest album, Delta Machine, some reviewers are pissed that they don't still make exactly the same music they did in the 80s. I'm not kidding.

If Linkin Park lasts 30+ years, I guess that's something they can continue to look forward to. *g* (Since they already have people deeply pissed their music is evolving.) I was annoyed with Linkin Park when their most recent album, Living Things, went backward a bit toward their older style in response to their haters/former fans. The people missing their old style still weren't happy of course because it's not old style enough. I hope LP learned from this that they shouldn't bother trying to make the bitter haters happy. Keep making albums like the prior one, A Thousand Suns, where you follow your own inspiration without worrying, because with Living Things some of the Thousand Suns fans were disappointed they didn't continue to go forward, while a lot of the people who want more Hybrid Theory and/or Meteora responded with "That's a lie; it's a trap!" and nobody was happy.

Except people who like to hate, and that kind of hater's happy is sadomasochistic in that it also hurts the rest of us.



(I liked Delta Machine, though I felt it has some flaws. It was also a good album to be listening to while I was watching Hannibal. I may talk about it in a future post.)

It's been a deeply disappointing month for NYC store windows. Saks is on its second or third boring, spare series since it took its Christmas windows down. Bergdorf is taking down its own simplistic and spare displays along 5th Avenue and 58th Street, while it's doing a second somewhat interesting series on 57th Street but the white light was blinding off the white heads of the mannequins so a lot of my pics were a wash. I only ended up putting two new photos up for this sports-themed series. As for the usually cool Chinese New Year windows Bergdorf does annually, so far what you see to the left is it. They seriously couldn't do more for the Year of the Snake? Bloomingdale's still has its own Year of the Snake displays up, just with different outfits in them.

So I only have three new window display photos and two cemetery photos up on my Flickr account and my deviantArt.

More buildings and streetlights in Manhattan are switching to LED and I'm hating it, but it looks like I'll have to get used to it.

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Depeche Mode is putting a new album out, Delta Machine, and I have mixed feelings about the single I've heard from it, "Heaven." It's rather slow and it didn't grab me, but I know that a lot of times I need to heard a Depeche Mode song a few times before it really grows on me. Then again, I was really underwhelmed by their last album, Sounds of the Universe. Since it's a pre-order, amazon isn't offering sound clips either. Aw, but look at that photo of them in front of the Unisphere.

In other news, Zeromancer also has a new album, Bye-Bye Borderline, coming out and again it's priced at a height I think ridiculous for a regular-sized album on CD, which is why I haven't bought an album of theirs since 2002's Eurotrash. Yeah, they're all cheaper as MP3 albums, but I like having a physical backup of things I've bought in case of computer catastrophe. Plus, I love liner notes and I'm a traditionalist on a lot of music things.