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"      Over the course of their 33-year career, the members of Depeche Mode have proven themselves impressively capable of staying up-to-the-minute relevant without contorting themselves too much to fit the sounds of the time. Their early work was accessible enough for a pop audience but beat-driven enough \u2014 and kinky enough \u2014 to appeal to a confederation of edgy subcultures that included goths, punks, and members of the burgeoning electronic dance music scene. By 1990&amp;#039;s Violator, they had rebranded themselves as a guitar rock band with a postmodern slant, blending synthesizers and blues guitar in a brilliant way that set them up nicely for the alternative rock boom that was just about to explode. When the turn of the millennium brought their old sounds back into style, they were there with keyboards in hand to capitalize on it. The group&amp;#039;s thirteenth album, Delta Machine, released today, finds them as capable as ever of pinning the right set of sounds to the right time. It would be easy for a band like this to coast. By your thirteenth album, you&amp;#039;re not expected to sound entirely up to date, and with interest in their early work still running high, there&amp;#039;s really not much incentive for them to do so. And honestly, the type of listener who considers themselves to have serious tastes has always treated Depeche Mode as a countercultural punchline, so why wouldn&amp;#039;t they choose to coast into middle age on the strength of their past glories rather than making some of the most sonically challenging albums of their career? That&amp;#039;s one of the questions that Delta Machine brings up again and again. The other ones mostly have to do with what kind of effects they used to twist Martin Gore&amp;#039;s guitar leads into such fascinatingly obscene shapes. Gore, the band&amp;#039;s primary architect, and producer Flood (who&amp;#039;s manned the boards on past Depeche Mode releases, as well as on albums by most major acts of the alt-rock era) are working with an aggressively weird sonic palette: guitars tweaked until they sound like synthesizers, synths set to sound like they&amp;#039;re malfunctioning, drum parts built out of an assortment of slaps and bursts of static and only the occasional noise that sounds like an actual drum. And unlike the majority of pop artists who&amp;#039;ve sustained recording careers into their fifties, Gore and frontman Dave Gahan haven&amp;#039;t started writing paens to the simple joys of domestic life. &amp;quot;Angel&amp;quot; is smacked-out blues as good as anything from Violator, built on top of a grinding, pulsating bassline that suggests what would happen if Nick Cave blacked out and brought a dubstep track home from the bar. &amp;quot;Slow&amp;quot; builds a creepy atmosphere out of ambient noises that give the sex-heavy lyrics a deviant slant. Then again, any song where a 50-year-old man goes into specific detail about the way he likes to get his fk on is probably going to be something you walk away from feeling a little dirty. &amp;quot;Slow&amp;quot; could have benefitted from lyrics with a little more poetic subtlety than &amp;quot;Slow / slow / slow as you can go / so I can feel all I want to know,&amp;quot; especially when Gahan&amp;#039;s delivering them with all of the considerable vibrato-laden melodrama he can muster. In fact, the album repeatedly trips on its words, and overall it gives the feeling that Gore spent a massive amount of thought and effort on the music only to knock out the words in an afternoon while he caught up on his Netflix queue. If it wasn&amp;#039;t for its numerous lyrical missteps, Delta Machine would easily be one of the best recordings in Depeche Mode&amp;#039;s catalog, and maybe even the best. As it stands, it will have to be content to compete for a spot a couple of rungs lower, which for a thirteenth album isn&amp;#039;t bad at all. It&amp;#039;s impressive to see a band get so far into their career without losing their desire to experiment and explore, or their ability to surprise.      PLUS: Listen to Depeche Mode and More in Andy Langer&amp;#039;s Songs of the Week &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; -- Miles Raymer is a music writer based in New York City who has contributed to the Chicago Reader, Vice, Pitchfork, and others. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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