album // Songs Of Faith And Devotion Live
Released just nine months after its studio counterpart, Depeche Mode's Songs Of Faith And Devotion Live collects live versions of each of the main album's tracks recorded at various dates across Europe in 1993. The Devotional tour proved to be physically, mentally and emotionally devastating for Depeche Mode, but as is clearly demonstrated on this album, the tour also yielded some of their darkest, most powerful and most engagingly fraught performances.
Although an unusual format for a live album, recreating a studio album in its original sequence with live versions, Songs Of Faith And Devotion Live reiterates the well-known fact that Depeche Mode have always been a faultless band on stage - Dave Gahan is an effervescent frontman still capable of delivering the exactness of these beatifully dark songs in a live setting, while Martin Gore, Andrew Fletcher and Alan Wilder create faithful yet elongated versions of the tracks, all the while supplying those tricky three-part harmonies with barely a wrong note. Whilst wrongly cast as a stadium rock act around this time, the choice of 'micro' sounds, the atmospheric intros and intricate synth progressions that get inadvertently lost in murky live mixes, totally belie that reputation.
Songs Of Faith And Devotion Live does stretch the studio tracks into longer, more tense and more expressive renditions of themselves. At times brutal - the versions of 'I Feel You' and 'Rush' (where Alan Wilder's drumming is most prevalent) are notably harrowing - elsewhere we are treated to some truly fragile performances from Gore on 'Judas' and 'One Caress', which sound even more desperate and longing than on Songs Of Faith And Devotion proper. The addition of two gospel backing singers (Hilda Campbell and Samantha Smith) gives tracks like 'Condemnation' a religious feverishness, while the uplifting 'Mercy' is augmented by some irrepressibly funky wah-wah guitar and chunky hip-hop beats.
Seeing them live myself at Birmingham's NEC only a week or so before this was released, what's unusual is knowing that 'Higher Love', the album's inspiring closer, actually opened the live shows, performed amazingly from behind white drapes with the stretched and lithe figure of Dave only visible as a giant silhouette. There is just something about these songs performed live that requires for them to be seen, not just heard - thank God for the Anton Corbijn-directed video Devotional (getting a long-overdue re-release on DVD in September 2004) released simultaneously with Songs Of Faith And Devotion Live. Unforgettable.