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Review: This deluxe edition of Depeche Mode's latest album Memento Mori features a wealth of additional material, adding all manner of tangents in relation to the former trio's (now duo's) ultimate reflection on death. Centring on the mood of grief after the passing of the band's founding member Andrew 'Fletch' Fletcher, this is the first LP by a Depeche Mode made up of only two remaining members: Gahan and Gore. It hears a sadder, gloomier yet no less slowly euphoric sound, with lead singles like 'Ghosts Again' presenting a kind of conflicted melancholia.

Review: Depeche Mode's latest album Memento Mori is something of a post-COVID gestator, but that's had little to no effect on its rabid fan anticipation. Centring on the mood of grief after the passing of the band's founding member Andrew "Fletch" Fletcher, this is the first LP by a Depeche Mode made up of only two remaining members: Dave Gahan and Martin Gore. The band's progression in their latest years have heard them move into darker, peakier, sadder and more industrial themes, as they make do with a future-present that wasn't promised to them in the 80s, while drawing on deathly topoi and nodding to Ingmar Bergman.

Review: Recent reviews of Spirit, Depeche Mode's first studio set for four years, have remarked at how angry and frustrated the band seems to be throughout. Messers Gore, Gahan and Fletcher are not particularly happy with the way the world is right now, and have laid down an album of rare intensity, seemingly fuelled by a growing desperation at political events on both sides of the Atlantic. Producer James Ford undoubtedly played a role in defining the sound of Sprit, but the combination of raucous, punk style guitars, thrusting electronics and big choruses is what we've come to expect from Depeche Mode.

Review: When vital bandmember Andrew Fletcher suddenly passed away at the start of the sessions for 'Memento Mori', even Dave Gahan and Martin Gore wondered aloud whether Depeche Mode would continue. Yet somehow, Gore and Gahan put their much-discussed differences aside, knuckled down and produced something fittingly special: an album that may well be the iconic outfit's most consistent and impressive body of work for decades. Naturally, darkness abounds, with opener 'My Cosmos Is Mine' - all evocative vocals, distorted electronic beats, dark sonic textures and mutilated choral vocal samples - setting the tone for a set that once again brilliantly blends dark synth-pop, gnarled guitars and the kind of lyrical melancholia that stays with you for days. Highlights are plentiful, with our picks including 'Ghosts Again', 'Soul With Me' and closing cut 'Speak To Me'.

Review: Depeche Mode's latest album Memento Mori is one that has been madly anticipated by fans. The record - which comes on wax and in a lovely embossed sleeve here - centres on the mood of grief after the passing of the band's founding member Andrew "Fletch" Fletcher, this is the first LP by a Depeche Mode made up of only two remaining members: Dave Gahan and Martin Gore. The band's progression in their latest years have heard them move into darker, peakier, sadder and more industrial themes, as they make do with a future-present that wasn't promised to them in the 80s, while drawing on deathly topoi and nodding to Ingmar Bergman.

Review: Where do you start with a band like Depeche Mode? Easily up there with the most influential British live acts of the late-20th Century, and early-mid-21st - a term we specifically use because their work spans so many genres, from synth pop and new wave to alt and dance rock - the fact just one of their records can garner the kind of reverence that can produce 33 remixes by some of the most respected names in electronic sounds says more than we ever could even if this paragraph went on forever.

Here we have it, then, definitive collection of repurposed and rethought songs from the 2001 LP, Exciter. Veering from the deep proggyness of Danny Tenaglia's take on 'I Feel Loved', through Dave Clarke's breakneck sledgehammer-yet-spacey techno interpretation of 'Dream On', broad sounds would be putting it mildly indeed. Other highlights including the lucid downbeat of Bertrant Burgalat, epic dance metal of DJ Muggs, and sparse, stargazing atmospheres of Isan Falling Leaf.