E-Mail This Article to a Friend Salvation army Depeche Mode’s Playing the Angel BY TED DROZDOWSKI
	Related Links Depeche Mode's official Web site Tony Ware reviews Depeche Mode's Remixes 81-04. Ted Drozdowski reviews Dave Gahan and Martin Gore solo albums.

It starts with a scream. Albeit an electronic one, with the shock value of a squad car shrieking through your frontal lobe. That’s the first clue that Depeche Mode are in formative electro-pop mode on Playing the Angel (Sire/Reprise/Mute). The disc brims with their early hallmarks, lamentation and experimentation, but it has some fresh juice in the tougher guitars of "Suffer Well" and the beats that drive with the heat of a trucker hopped up on speedballs.

Maybe that’s an awkward comparison given that some of these songs deal with singer Dave Gahan’s heroin addiction and recovery. Gahan had already come out of his spiral when the English keyboard-band pioneers released their previous album, 2001’s Exciter (Reprise/Mute). He spoke candidly then of his attempted suicide and illness. What’s new this time is that he writes about it.

Exciter explored themes of spiritual salvation, hinting at the arrival of a truly personal Jesus in the lives of both Gahan and the group’s long-time principal songwriter, Martin Gore. This time, the lyrics Gahan contributes reach a few clicks into his darker past, and he doesn’t hold back on his band mates. Raw as a pulsing wound, "Suffer Well" asks, "Where were you when I fell from grace/A frozen heart, an empty space." It’s a question, Gahan has admitted in interviews, directed to Gore, who apparently had no idea his creative partner of 25 years was — well, as the Staples Singers once put it, riding the white horse to near oblivion.

There are a positive things here too. "Macro" is a kind of abstract Buddhist koan in which Gore, who sings the tune in his unbalanced tenor, talks about the universe in a blade of grass — a shout-out to brotherly love and human connection on a molecular level.

But the most interesting songs are the ones in which Gahan drags out his troubles and, in the case of "I Want It All," rakes himself over coals in the manner of an addict exploring the stages of recovery. He’s acknowledging mistakes, apologizing, and trying to move ahead. "I see a river/It’s oceans that I want/You have to give me everything/But everything’s not real," he sings, headed for the climax: "A line I drew in the sand/And still you give me everything/But everything’s not enough . . . Come on over and lay down beside me/And I’ll try/And I’ll try." While he tries, the music surges ahead like a steam locomotive stuffed in an oven mitt — all muffled percolation with curious filigrees ladled on. The song has an instrumental dénouement that modulates up, huffs along like a man’s final breaths, then squeaks into the void. It’s unnerving and transfixing, just like Gahan’s descent, which might seem perplexing to us mere mortals who haven’t spent the last 20 years with millions in the bank and the ego boost of stardom. But I’ve learned not to mock the whining or self-made drama of rock stars since Kurt Cobain proved the hard way that he wasn’t bullshitting.

Besides, Depeche Mode are rock’s most famous whiners. It’s what they’ve done, and beautifully, since the early ’80s, when they helped make synth-pop a genre while bemoaning the fragility of life in "Fly on a Windscreen" and "Blasphemous Rumors." As they’ve grown older, they’ve zeroed in even more on what George Herbert Bush might have called "the God thing," searching for some kind of spiritual centering.

There’s also "the odd thing," the bevy of growling, blipping, and unpredictable sounds that leap from even the most melodic or rhythmically steadfast sections of their arrangements. That sonic boldness, still salient as ever here, blended with the poignance of their lyrics, an unfailing melodic sense, and Gahan’s worldly romantic’s delivery is what’s kept Depeche Mode thriving for decades, after more-recent fire starters have turned to ash.