album // Construction Time Again
Album number three from Depeche Mode
and all of a sudden the atmosphere has rapidly darkened. The experimental
leanings that produced A Broken Frame's 'Monument' bleed
across into Construction Time Again, particularly on the
lengthy centrepiece 'Pipeline', and that song's evocation of hard
graft and the monotony of manual labour inform the sleeve's supposedly
Marxist / Stakhanovite imagery. Construction Time Again
was the first Mode album to feature Alan Wilder,
who would stay with the band until after Songs Of Faith And
Devotion, and he contributes two tracks to the album.
Construction Time Again saw the band working
with Daniel Miller once again; engineer Gareth
Jones joined the ranks, starting his long-standing
working partnership with the band. The album saw a wider array of
sounds being employed - mostly thanks to the Synclavier mono sampler
used by Miller, Jones and the band. Trumpet sounds and Spanish guitar
licks embellish the single 'Love, In Itself' and 'Pipeline' features
all manner of Neubuaten-style junkyard and 'industrial'
sounds, largely recorded in an East London railway yard. Alongside
'Love, In Itself', Construction Time Again spawned a huge
hit for the band in the single 'Everything Counts', generally the
oldest song the band have played live for some years.
Construction Time Again finds the band
developing a distinctive sound some distance from the (mostly) poppy
sound of their preceding two albums; the word 'mature' is often
levelled at bands transcending pop / throwaway routes, but that
isn't what Construction Time Again is. Besides, in 1983
the band (with the exception of Wilder, who apparently lied about
his age to get into the band; maybe Miller was here adopting a Louie
Walsh persona) were still fresh faced and youthful. 'More Than A
Party' is a good example of the change in style. Fast-paced with
a heavy rhythm, the song is delivered by Dave Gahan
in a lower key than he'd explored previously gives an air of bleak
anxiety. The atmosphere and frenetic drums ensures that this is
a party I'd never really want to go to. After the cynical pop of
opener 'Love, In Itself', 'More Than A Party' arrives as something
of a shock. Elsewhere, the manic 'Told You So' seems to deal with
the reckless state of the world and finds Martin Gore
writing about the end of the world and guns - certainly not what
you'd expect from the man who'd penned 'See You' and the 'Meaning
Of Love'. Lots of synth horn sounds and pipe-clanging dominate the
backdrop. A live version of this turned up on the B-side of Some
Great Reward's 'Blasphemous Rumours' / 'Somebody' single. The
Judgement Day theme also creeps into the riddle-strewn 'Shame',
dealing with the fundamental greed and deceitfulness of the human
race. It's Old Testament stuff in many ways, which surprises - that
religious theme didn't come to the forefront of Gore's songwriting
until later, I thought, yet here is a younger version of it on Construction
Time Again. Alongside a squelchy bass sound and some aloof
synth melodies, there's also what sounds like a flute or a recorder.
On a Depeche Mode record. Go figure.
The two Alan Wilder songs are, for me, two of the
best songs here. Both have a serious, if poppy, sound which sets
them apart from other songs on the album. 'Two Minute Warning' finds
us back at the end of the world, all nuclear paranoia and total
structural collapse, sung by Gahan in a wide-eyed, awe-struck voice
which made me think it couldn't possibly be him when I first heard
this. More pipe-bashing here, but also some of the best synth sounds
on the whole album. 'The Landscape Is Changing' (exactly how negative
were this band at this point?) has Gahan pondering environmental
devastation by mankind, the counterpoint to the industrial effluence
evoked by 'Pipeline', and just to force the connection there are
riffs played on sampled pipes. 'I don't care if you're going
nowhere / Just take good care of the world' sings Gahan, well
before Anita Roddick brought environmental awareness to popular
culture.
The core of this album, however, is dominated by
'Pipeline', an unusual song which gives the album its themes of
hard labour and struggle. Sung by Gore, its lyrics complement the
musical bedrock to such an extent that I wondered - wrongly - whether
the music prompted the lyrics rather than the other way round. 'All
of Martin's songs were always demoed,' Gareth Jones tells me. 'The
thing about 'Pipeline' is that when it came to the recording and
the production of the song we made a deliberate decision to only
use sampled sounds to play all the musical parts and the beats and
so on. So the sonic world was very much created through the sampler
and through the studio, and we followed this purist approach through
to the mixing stage, where no equalisation or compression or extra
reverberations were added to the sound we had on the multitrack.'
The environmental sounds for 'Pipeline' were recorded
at a disused railway siding near to the Garden Studios in East London
where Depeche Mode were working on the album. 'I'd purchased a Stellavox
SP7,' says Jones, 'This is a beautiful - and very high quality -
portable analogue tape recorder, which I'd used to record an album
with a minimal systems music group called Lost Jockey already. Here
it came into another fantastic use because we were able to take
high quality studio microphones out into the field along with hammers
and drumsticks and bits of wood and all kinds of things so that
we could capture in great analogue audio fidelity the sounds of
the environment of this scrapyard. We recorded with one mic usually
quite close to the object or soundsource that we were sampling and
one mic really as far distant as the microphone cable might allow
us to go, perhaps 5m back or somewhere between 5m and 2m away from
the soundsource to allow us to capture an ambient image of the soundsource.
So we were going for close-up and wide images of the sounds. Then
we went back to the studio and digitised the analogue recordings
into an early Synclavier sampling system that Daniel Miller had
bought for the sessions. Many of the riffs and melodies were written
already so really it was a question of choosing the samples and
their ambiences. The Synclavier was a mono sampler so the ambience
was always mixed in with the close sound depending on how we felt
about the appropriateness of the ambient sound on the riff we were
tracking. Between us we chose different sampled sounds to play different
parts of the song.'
Recording the vocals for 'Pipeline' saw the band
return to the sidings again. 'When we created a backing track we
put it on a Sony professional Walkman cassette recorder and did
some vocals with the ambience - both emotional and sonic - of the
sidings on the vocal track. We recorded the vocals back to the Stellavox
SP7 and then brought that back into the studio and then laid that
onto the 2in multitrack analogue tape.'
I say to Jones that I can't imagine a bunch of young
guys let loose in a scrapyard didn't see lots of mucking about.
'We made a backup recording of what we were doing on the Walkman
and on the backup recording there is indeed a lot of ambient banter
and it's a bit of a documentary of how we were actually capturing
the sounds. I had the pleasure of listening to that recently and
it made me smile. It was a bit of nostalgia and a bit of respect
really for our ambition and our focus.'
Jones had previously told me that 'Pipeline' was
a pleasure to create and be involved with. 'There's something special
about 'Pipeline' as I say because we resolutely stuck to the sampler.'
'Well done team,' he concludes, evidently grinning
as he does.
Gareth Jones website: www.garethjones.com
lp/c/cd:
1. Love, In Itself
2. More Than A Party
3. Pipeline
4. Everything Counts
5. Two Minute Warning
6. Shame
7. The Landscape Is Changing
8. Told You So
9. And Then...
10. Everything Counts (Reprise)
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