Depeche Mode
Memento Mori: Mexico City
COLUMBIA
Nearly 35 years ago, Depeche Mode dedicated a documentary’s film and live album—101—to their remarkable coming-of-age story: from being birthed as the UK’s most juvenile synth-pop band to becoming the most emotionally charged new-wave adults whose mature mood swings turned the heads of Pasadena youths circa 1988. Though the phrase “the year that punk broke” is overused, it does fit those mascara-runny children who packed the Rose Bowl in the sweltering heat and thundering rain to hear Dave Gahan, Martin Gore, Andrew Fletcher, and Alan Wilder tackle the silver and slabs of darkness and light that infiltrates electro-ensemble anthems such as “Never Let Me Down Again.”
And while the legend has it that 101 was a turning point for Depeche Mode—how does one go on when all of your dreams are met, then surpassed?—Memento Mori: Mexico City shows and tells us something more: how a lifelong band survives its travails and losses while maturing their dusky music handsomely, poignantly, and with deep connection to their audience and their remaining two members. Released and toured after the passing of Fletcher, 2023’s Memento Mori LP was designed to salute their fallen brother in synths, pare down their sound from the full rock-band thunder they developed over time, and dramatically celebrate death in all its glory.
Mexican filmmaker Fernando Frías’ directorship of the new M concert documentary does, indeed, capture Mexico City’s beautifully uncomfortable and colorfully cluttered relationship with the hereafter, just as Gore and Gahan make death and doom their Poe-like familiar on new and older live tracks such as “Sister of Night,” “Soul with Me,” and “Ghosts Again,” and a handful of Memento Mori studio leftovers (quiet songs such as “In the End” and “Life 2.0”) that fill this collection. Every moment glows with goodly gloom and bejeweled rumination: studio oddities such as the lustrous and lusty “Give Yourself to Me,” the life-above-all “Survive,” the live-crowd politik of “Everything Counts,” the snakily sensual hammering of “I Feel You” and “Stripped,” the elegiac Euro-elegance of “World in My Eyes” and “Never Let Me Down Again.” Only the wee-pop of “Just Can’t Get Enough” sounds out of place and should be retired as “People Are People” was after the 101 tour.
Having witnessed several of Depeche Mode’s Mori tour dates, I can attest to how the new film and the live album act as winning, powerful mementos of a crowd’s feelings for this icy sound, and as a honed-and-focused representation as to where Gore and Gahan are now, in celebration of an aesthetic that’s gone on since 1980.
