Depeche Mode
Heaven

Punctual like a cuckoo clock from the Black Forest, Depeche Mode break their usual four-year hiatus by announcing - somewhat quietly - the awaited comeback. As per the script, Gahan & co. focus primarily on the new spring-summer world tour and release the complete list of dates (among which Milan and Rome stand out) and only later reveal the juicy details about the album and lead single. Delta Machine and Heaven, titles of the album and track respectively, appear on the web like a bolt from the blue: you're aware of a new work by Depeche Mode for the current year, you casually open their Wikipedia page (preferably in English, much richer in content and attentive to the slightest changes) and find yourself facing album, single, cover (not particularly fascinating), tracklist, with the release date of the leading track and its debut on radio frequencies attached.

Delta Machine arrives four years after the decent venture of Sounds of The Universe, a good dark-synth production straddling avant-gardism and retrospection that literally polarized the aficionados of the English band, troubled by the slightly dampened expectations of the single Wrong, unable to withstand the heavy comparison with milestones such as Precious, I Feel You, Barrel of a Gun and, of course, the masterpieces of the Violator era. The acclaimed "sounds of the Universe," according to the fiercest critics, failed to carry forward the creative path undertaken with the dark and enigmatic Playing The Angel and sadly regressed towards a mixture of '80s electronics and carefree, artificially glittery contemporary pop suggestions; not even the presence of excellent pieces like Hole to Feed, Corrupt and In Chains could guarantee unanimous opinions and thus, the hurriedly forgotten umpteenth compilation of remixes Remixes 81-11, only the arrival of 2013 could have averted or not the decline of one of the most rocky vestiges of the Glorious Decade.

The return with Heaven is still difficult to judge and, probably, not even an infinitely greater number of listens to the track will provide a correct evaluation of what Delta Machine and the blast furnaces on the cover will be. Let’s start by saying that the lead single unfortunately fails to replicate the power of past openers and is not the classic bearer of retro-synth energy à la Precious: a sort of slowjam straddling country, blues, alternative rock, and meticulous electronics, Heaven seems to the attentive listener a "hodgepodge" of the entire thirty-year repertoire proposed by Gahan and company. In the track, in fact, there is everything and more: it starts with an intro vaguely inspired by the dreamlike atmospheres of Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight, then plunges into a slow verse that recalls the almost fatal overdose memory of Ultra's tracks (Sister of Night, Useless); by the first chorus, here emerge the vocalizations of the inevitable Martin Gore who, inevitably, inserts the poetic theatrical laments of the tracks exclusively performed by him (One Caress, Jezebel, Home). The rest of the track does not change in particular dynamism and fuses together everything - or almost - the ballad repertoire proposed in the last twenty years, veiling it with substantial country and blues components, moreover already experimented in the past and with a hint of upcoming recovery.

In essence, Heaven is certainly a track that rewards the versatility of the historic formation and the commendable attempt to break away from the now oversaturated commercial synthpop; however, it fails - in my opinion - to demonstrate the dynamism and verve of people who have etched one of the landmark graffiti in the history of alternative "pop" onto records. There is nothing left but to anxiously await the release of the fourteenth studio product made by Depeche Mode, the fourteenth step towards the Olympus of the survivors.