Depeche Mode – Playing the Angel
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Depeche Mode lately, in part because I wrote a long piece about Violator for the Treble 100 series, which perhaps isn’t my favorite essay that I’ve written for the series, but still pretty good! (I’m a harsh judge of my own writing, as most writers probably are.) But I remember in college, after being a big fan for a while, buying 2001’s Exciter and thinking, outside of a few songs, that I wasn’t terribly excited about the album. It’s fine, really, but ironically didn’t live up to its name all that well.
For that reason I had checked out of new Depeche Mode releases for a while, and as a result, I missed out on their next couple albums at the time, 2005’s Playing the Angel and 2009’s Sounds of the Universe. Maybe I saw the video for “John the Revelator” on Subterranean—that sounds about right, and I remember thinking it seemed pretty cool at the time (though the blues/religion thing was well covered in “Personal Jesus,” “I Feel You,” you get the idea…). But I just didn’t really think much about it. About six or seven years later, I finally got around to giving those albums a go after hearing 2013’s Delta Machine (which is also not one of their best, but still pretty fun). Sounds of the Universe is maybe a bit too long, but still pretty decent, but Playing the Angel is, I’m not hesitant to say, deserving of higher-tier honors.
Yeah, it’s a fantastic album, and I’ll even cop to being wrong about “John the Revelator,” which actually adds more depth to their synth-blues. Great song, that. Even better is “Precious,” which features a fantastic vocal melody from Dave Gahan, and packs hooks into seemingly subtle spaces. The first track, “A Pain I’ve Been Used To” is a kind of industrial/noise rock take on the band’s pop approach, and “Nothing’s Impossible” is kind of a low-simmering menace that speaks my language. I think now, nearly 20 years later, I’m not alone in thinking this is one of the strongest albums in the Depeche Mode catalog, though to be fair, there are a lot of great ones. Even if it’s seventh best or whatever, that’s still a pretty high honor.
I bought it while living in a short-term apartment rental in Richmond. No particular reason, just figured it was time.
Rating: 9.2
Sound Quality: Great
Moor Mother – Black Encyclopedia of the Air
I’ve written about Moor Mother quite a bit, and this is (doing math in my head), the fourth Moor Mother record I picked up? Including Irreversible Entanglements. It’s also not the last. Her music covers a lot of ground and never stays in one place too long, whether it’s free-jazz or spoken word or hip-hop, and the target’s always moving. On Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, for instance, she blends industrial rap with sound collage and trip-hop and various other things that feels cohesive but tricky to pin down. Which is what makes it interesting, naturally.
Black Encyclopedia of the Air is one of her most accessible and low-key releases, her first for Anti-, which also releases music from the likes of Tom Waits and Neko Case and Mavis Staples. It’s at times more conventionally hip-hop, or perhaps trip-hop, generally pretty chill, even quite pretty at various moments throughout. She released this after some of her more abrasive releases, so there was probably some attempt to swing the pendulum a bit, and she followed this with another relatively chill record, JAZZ CODES. But this year she dropped The Great Bailout which is dark, intense and harrowing, so the pendulum swings back.
I won’t get into the weeds of individual tracks for the sake of time, but this is a good starting place for those looking to dive into Moor Mother’s catalog. Highly recommended.
Rating: 9.1
Sound Quality: Great
Donald Byrd – Stepping Into Tomorrow
And now, some jazz fusion! I picked this up at Records and Relics, a shop in my neighborhood in Richmond, Church Hill, where I like to go from time to time with no agenda in particular and just comb through whatever’s there. It’s a small shop with only used records so that’s the only way to go, really. But I always find something cool, for the most part. Like this.
I wrote about Donald Byrd in a previous post, so I won’t go into the whole background on his body of work, which is vast and diverse. But this one’s probably somewhat familiar to hip-hop fans. I first got into this record after hearing Madlib’s Shades of Blue, in which he was asked to create new beatscapes from the Blue Note catalog, and it’s a great record for anyone who hasn’t had the chance to hear it. “Stepping Into Tomorrow” is one of the tracks he used, and it’s funky as hell while being cosmic and trippy, future-jazz that makes the ’70s sound dope as hell. (I was born in ’81, so I didn’t experience Watergate and gas shortages and Studio 54 firsthand.) The album also features “Think Twice,” which was sampled in Main Source’s “Looking at the Front Door.” (See my Main Source post here.) Basically an essential set of crate-digger grooves, occasionally veering into pop cheese, but for the most part funky and thick with vibes.
Rating: 9.0
Sound Quality: Great
1000 Times Jeff 
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