Pitchfork

At this point I have accepted my role as one of Pitchfork's go-to "Best of" and reissue guys. I'm old and cranky. My interests these days are bourbon, my bicycle, and the collected works of Al Green. And Pitchfork has already reviewed approximately 90,000 Depeche Mode albums, reissues, and compilations. (Nitsuh Abebe alone has reviewed 67,843 of them.) What's possibly left to say about these 18 songs except that capitalism marches ever onward? Or that if you really needed to hear a few songs off 2001's Exciter and 2005's Playing the Angel-- and, of course, one new tune-- that now you've got your chance?

When I was in the early days of high school, a time when kids in my study hall thought the riff in Collective Soul's "Shine" was, like, totally boss, Depeche Mode were dismissed as a "gay keyboard band" by a friend's cousin, a sentiment probably echoed no less than 2 million times over the past 20 years. We thought he was hella cool because he liked the Jesus Lizard and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. Actually, he was a douchebag who probably has throat cancer now. And though the Jesus Lizard are still great and his statement was perhaps accurate as a description, it doesn't stand up as criticism. Depeche Mode were a great keyboard band. Especially at the beginning, the band offered synthetic, electric hooks as pure and sugary as New Edition, something that's easy to forget with all the iron crucifixes and black-and-white videos that followed (a period which itself is not without its charms). Depeche more or less were formed in 1976 by Vince Clarke and Andrew Fletcher as No Romance in China. By 1980, they had settled into the name they're best remembered for and the basic lineup of Clark, Fletcher, Martin Gore, and Dave Gahan on vocals. Long before he was a strung out Jack Sparrow-- amazingly Googling "Dave Gahan", "Jack Sparrow" brought up not only results but Depeche Mode/dead pirate slash, proving once again that goth kids will never disappoint-- this dude was Lance Bass with vinyl vests and jaunty little caps.

Clarke left to form Yaz and then Erasure right after Depeche scored their first major hits, the British Top 10 "Just Can't Get Enough" and its parent album Speak and Spell. The remaining Depechies listened to their scary DAF records and knew that a whole generation of the sexually frustrated could relate, were it garnished with pretty Eurotrash boys with ropey arms and peroxide dye jobs and lyrics about how hard it is to be a sensitive flower. Being a sensitive flower who once tried to impress a girl by pointing out how much the lead character in Sandman looked like Robert Smith, you'd think this would have been right up my alley. But despite buying Joy Division albums through Columbia House, I was never a goth, and I listened to too much pop-punk and hardcore as a teenager to really lay back and wallow. "Everything Counts", from 1983's mini-mall industrial Construction Time Again, was recorded with newest member Alan Wilder. Gahan's voice had deepened and so had the timbre of the synthesizers; Depeche Mode would be catchy again, but they would never be upbeat. Leather and eyeliner were never part of my world; I wore the same Chuck Taylors and black T-shirt throughout high school. Even though I've got the requisite fucked up emotions when it comes to the meeting of sex and religious imagery, Depeche Mode's heavy-breathing lapsed Catholicism may have meant more if they, like me, dressed like the Ramones.

On the other hand, they meant a hell of a lot to a hell of a lot of other people. By the end of the 1980s, Depeche were, if not causing rioting in the streets, coming close enough: They were a legit teen phenomenon. Some Great Reward was the breakthrough. If the early records could sound thin and blippy, "Master and Servant" had the kind of Bonham-heavy drum machines that could reach the cheap seats in the stadiums the band clearly wanted to be playing to and would be soon enough. The band perfected a kind of music that you could do a sort of acute gastrointestinal disorder shuffle to, as kids without a funky bone in their bodies laced up their Doc Martins and gathered in pool halls and roller rinks done up in blacklight. The Best of Volume 1 gives the short shrift to Black Celebration, the 1986 album that gave the gift of a name to goth club nights around the world. It turned out no real hits but it affirmed that Depeche Mode's sonic goal was total domination-- albeit domination that swayed with an anorexic's gait-- mixed with ballads that became mixtape staples.

Music for the Masses (1987) made the ambition plain in the title. This was the beginning of Depeche's shift from synth-pop/fake-industrial/goth pioneers to "modern rock" pioneers, spoken of alongside New Order and, uh, World Party in that decade-changing pause for breath just before Nirvana briefly gave the keys to pop to guys like my friend's cousin and the Collective Soul fans in eighth period. "Never Let Me Down Again" plugs in the guitar, but it plugs it into the MIDI banks. Kinda rock, still mostly not. And then came Violator, the one Depeche Mode record that nearly everyone can agree on. Guitars! Like, actual prominent ones! As a few canny mixtape makers proved a few years ago, "Personal Jesus" is either throwback T.Rextacy or predicts Kompakt's techno-shuffle by a few billion years. Or it's both! Value for money! And you can listen to "Enjoy the Silence" alongside such sunny favorites as Jawbreaker's "Sea Foam Green". Emo! Songs of Faith and Devotion upped the grind/sleaze factor with singles like "I Feel You", but so did U2 during the middle of MacPhisto Madness, and you won't necessarily catch me stumping for that either. The band disappeared for a few years and returned with 97's Ultra (dingy, dubby, atmospheric, very pre-millennial tense) and 2001's Exciter (skeletal, grid-like, technoid, recorded under the director of LFO's Mark Bell), two turns toward the non-goth dancefloor that worked better remixed.

If this review seems confused between the 8+ rating and being basically indifferent to the idea of another shakedown of Depeche Mode history, you're not reading it wrong. The band's still putting out records and is a respectable part of rock history and so, yeah, multiple best-ofs and collections and remix compilations follow. I mean, I get it, but I'm not sure I get it, you know? Despite the evangelical efforts of Mike Shinoda, et al., the kids, they are not, how you say, plunking down close to 20 crumpled tooth fairy bills for a copy of the Depeche Mode best-of. In Phillip Sherburne's recent "Month in Techno" column, he claims to have recently repurchased a chunk of the Depeche catalog in a fit of funk, lamenting the fact that he's turned into one of those old dudes salving his pain with nostalgia for, like, old pain. So that's what this is for! I've been a miserable bastard lately, and this collection has indeed transported me back to a time I didn't even go through at the time, when a kid's most pressing problems could be dealt with by drawing the shades for six to eight hours.

I recently made my final trip to Tower Records, where people my age and up were snatching all sorts of greatest hits like it was a Black Friday white sale. Seeing people eyeball new records, at up to 70% off the sticker price, and still decide they weren't interested-- well, it was like watching the last days of Rome. Eventually, all music websites will be reviewing digital chunks downloaded directly into your cereal bowl every morning so you can be up on that prerelease leak as you eat your Wheaties. But best-of compilations will be among the last CDs to go. Those of us aghast and confused by the bleak, horrible future we've washed up in have to hold onto something.