Depeche Mode and the album ‘Violator’

Depeche Mode is due induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on November 7th, 2020. The 1990 album Violator is perhaps the most artistically complete of the bands albums, which prompts us to bring you the listening pleasure of including the album with links for your enjoyment all here in one place. Listen to the songs of Martin Gore, Dave Gahan, Andy Fletcher and Alan Wilder as we introduce you to Violator.

(This is the album cover for the Violator album by Depeche Mode).

World in My Eyes opens the Violater album for the English electronic band Depeche Mode. The clearly expresses a physical encounter, metaphorically communicating feelings that the initiator hopes to convey to the partner.

Sweetest Perfection offers insight into a longing for fulfillment, belonging, and a strong connection that is taken through sometimes artificial means. The realization that others recognize the artificial quality is realized yet problematic.

Priscilla Presley‘s book Elvis and Me: The True Story of the Love Between Priscilla Presley and the King of Rock N’ Roll supposedly inspired the song Personal Jesus. Elvis Presley would be Priscilla‘s husband in this case. As Martin Gore reportedly said as recounted by SongFacts, the song is “about being a Jesus for somebody else, someone to give you hope and care.”

Halo mixes a sense of gloominess with a brightness found in love, regardless of the circumstances of surrender that seemingly enables it.

(From left are Depeche Mode members Martin Gore, Dave Gahan, Alan Wilder, and Andrew Fletcher).

Waiting for the Night takes a bit of a tranquil feeling. Whether the tranquility is literally night, the onset of a traumatic awareness-dulling calamity, or the throws of death, the escape of the otherness offers relief from a burden that feels painful.

Enjoy the Silence is perhaps the most evocative and provocative song on the album. Is this song an answer to question of calamity from Waiting for the Night? Is this advocating for more thinking and feeling within a physical, romantic relationship? Is this a defense against external pressures of a world that won’t understand the love of two men, thus making insults harmful? My instinct is that the last is less the point than internal pressures within the relationship.

Policy of Truth offers the listener the notion that speaking truthfully, candidly, as decided from a point in childhood causes more pain than multiple shades of untruth between fully truthful and fiction. The pain forthcoming from an inability to change this policy, despite feedback to a sworn path towards change, isn’t forthcoming.

The straightforward meaning of Blue Dress is bringing a man simple release through control. It isn’t high end jewelry, flashy clothing, or expensive accessories that attracts him. The narrator of Blue Dress, in other words, seeks a lifestyle for his woman that many women would not accept or prefer.

Clean closes the Violator album with a euphemism for dying at one’s own hands. The album’s beginning in aiming to convince a partner how to see the world through the narrator’s eyes then asks a similar question now, yet with a starkly different physical tone and outcome for said narrator. The pain in the Policy of Truth, perhaps as applied in Blue Dress, is a grand total of self-imposed, confidence lost, cleanliness as death analogy.

This is scary territory should this read be true. If the album Violator ends the way Clean is laid out above, perhaps the album title is precisely what Depeche Mode told us with the title concerning self-compassion. Violator is an interesting album for sure.

Matt – Saturday, June 27, 2020