album // A Broken Frame
Post-Vince Clarke, pre-Alan
Wilder, A Broken Frame found Depeche Mode
supposedly rudderless without Vince's songwriting abilities. In
spite of the headwind created by losing their main songwriter, and
sensing accusations of being one-album wonders, Martin Gore
- who only contributed two songs to Speak & Spell - quickly
dusted down a few songs he'd written as a child, wrote a few more
and produced, in A Broken Frame, a decisively coherent
second album.
When young bands metamorphose and produce something
a bit more knowing, the music press tends to describe the resultant
music as being more 'mature'; while this does render anything previously
recorded as infantile or childish, in the case of A Broken Frame
it's difficult not to agree with that description. In spite of the
surface tweeness of the single 'See You', the lyrics elsewhere on
this album are pretty deep, displaying an assuredness in Gore's
writing that has never diminished. 'The Meaning Of Love', as an
example, appears to be a gleeful pop song but deftly asks some meaningful
questions about our obsession with the 'L' word; Gore would later
do the same only with religion replacing love.
Elsewhere, things veer toward the strange - 'Monument',
alluding to the Stakhanovite / Marxist tendencies more obviously
displayed on Construction Time Again, is a towering display
of electronic oddness; a pretty brave move for what was ostensibly
supposed to be Daniel Miller's radio-friendly synth-pop
trio. 'Shouldn't Have Done That' is similarly bizarre, a series
of electronic vignettes bound together into a seamless narrative,
depicting a boy growing up yet constantly getting reproached by
his mother's wagging finger.
'Nothing To Fear', an instrumental, starts off in
pop territory but includes a central melody which is loaded with
heavy emotion, while the wispy 'Satellite' dabbles in an almost
reggae vibe. 'A Photograph Of You' is simply a joyful, soulful,
throwaway pop track and doesn't pretend to be otherwise, providing
a pleasant interlude to the slightly more gloomy proceedings elsewhere.
The best tracks, though, are 'My Secret Garden'
and 'The Sun And The Rainfall'. The former is ethereal and mysterious,
developing out of an extended, laconic instrumental section before
breaking out into a serene, wry take on synth-pop. The latter is
positively epic for a band at this stage in their career and is
laden with much weariness and sorrow; its fragile central line 'Things
must change / We must re-arrange them / Or we'll have to exchange
them' containing possibly the most emotional weight on the
entire album. It also neatly segues into the bleaker territory evidenced
on 1983's Construction Time Again.
lp/c/cd:
1. Leave In Silence
2. My Secret Garden
3. Monument
4. Nothing To Fear
5. See You
6. Satellite
7. The Meaning Of Love
8. A Photograph Of You
9. Shouldn't Have Done That
10. The Sun And The Rainfall
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