Depeche Mode: Memento Mori review – a life-affirming farewell to Fletch | Depeche Mode

ANdy Fletcher’s death could have ended Depeche Mode. In Fletch’s 42-year tenure, cut short last May, the band Basildon have never made a truly bad album, rarely leaning into covers or re-recordings. The quality of the music has declined slightly over the decades, but their tours have grown and improved. Their last album would have been that of 2017 Minda decent slant to reinvent the great claustrophobia of the 1987 masterpiece Music for Masses. A solid legacy. Instead, surviving teammates Martin Gore and Dave Gahan reunited Memento Morian elegant farewell for Fletch.

Gore’s lyrics Say What You See are still the best on the essentials of life – sex and death – and Ghosts Again is the duo’s best single in ages, a uniquely concise and powerful meditation on mortality. . Both are beautifully voiced. Gore’s altar boy trills have never been so rich as on Soul With Me, while Gahan oscillates relentlessly between operatic and reptilian, electro-pop Freddie Mercury. There’s warmth to the album’s fusion of industrial grind and delicate melody, and producer James Ford elicits an invigorating weirdness in songs such as My Cosmos Is Mine. For a record preoccupied with death, its big heart bursts with life.