SOME GREAT REWARD

Depeche Mode: Martin Gore (vocals, keyboards, synthesizer); David Gahan (vocals); Andrew Fletcher, Alan Wilder (keyboards, synthesizer, background vocals). Producers: Depeche Mode, George Jones, Daniel Miller. Recorded at Music Works, London, England and Hansa Mischraum, Berlin, Germany. Depeche Mode's U.S. breakthrough album, 1984's SOME GREAT REWARD, expanded the U.K. synth band's American following from a small cult of Anglophiles to the same sort of teenage adulation that the Cure had started attracting around the same time. Featuring the Top 20 U.S. hit "People Are People," along with cult faves such as the intensely mopey "Blasphemous Rumours," the fashionably S&M-tinged "Master and Servant," and the disarmingly earnest love ballad "Somebody," this is the album on which Depeche Mode finally shed the stigma of founding songwriter Vince Clarke's departure. SOME GREAT REWARD finds Martin Gore coming into his own as a songwriter, with Alan Wilder taking Gore's place in the George Harrison role, adding two fine tunes of his own. The addition of mechanical factory noise to several songs, as well as the more introspective tones and more intricate constructions, aligned the band more with darker industrial bands than with sunny technopop groups. Meanwhile, Gahan's vocals started hinting at a deeper, moodier tint, foreshadowing the gloomier, more complex, more angular path that was to follow.