Depeche Mode
Spirit

Friday the 17th. A date that sends shivers down your spine, doesn’t it? Yet, this March, I was eagerly awaiting this moment: I’ve been a fan of Depeche since I was 16… and I was so impatient to listen to the new opus!

To be honest, the new single left me a bit cold (although I didn’t find Corbijn’s video bad at all), but it didn’t matter: my dear Depeche were back!!

And so, I rushed to listen to Spirit: once, twice… If you had asked me by the end of Friday, I would have said: “Oh no. No. No. No: it’s not possible.” I was disappointed. I think that, like other fans, I had hoped for a breath of fresh air: it was so reassuring to blame Ben Hillier if the last three Depeche albums hadn’t been much! I imagined that with this producer change, Depeche would return to making the kind of songs that had seduced me for the first time at 16… After all, it’s as if DM were my first love, right? Unfortunately, the only track I spared from the album, in the end, was just “So Much Love” and maybe, with a bit of goodwill, I would go on to mention “Poison Heart” and “You Move.”

I was a bit sad. And I was upset with myself when I thought, like any other fan bogged down in memories: “Ah, if only Alan were here…”.

Then today, I listened to this CD again. Although there's still nothing that makes me scream "masterpiece" like back then, I realize that some songs are catchy. Some - almost - are even starting to grow on me. And I think back to the first love metaphor. Kundera said that metaphors are dangerous... He might be right. I wonder if my loyalty to Depeche Mode isn’t due to the same type of blindness one can feel for a man: when you love, even if the partner gets fat, loses hair, and starts getting wrinkles, you keep loving them just the same – because you have fortunately become incapable of seeing what they've turned into.