Depeche Mode Construction Time Again CD

Live Recording

Depeche Mode: David Gahan (vocals); Martin Gore (keyboards, synthesizer, background vocals); Andrew Fletcher, Alan Wilder (keyboards, synthesizer).
Recorded at The Garden, London, England.
The full addition of Alan Wilder to Depeche Mode's lineup created a perfect troika that would last another 11 years, as the combination of Martin Gore's songwriting, Wilder's arranging, and David Gahan's singing and live star power resulted in an ever more compelling series of albums and singles. Construction Time Again, the new lineup's first full effort, is a bit hit and miss nonetheless, but when it does hit, it does so perfectly. Right from the album's first song, "Love in Itself," something is clearly up; Depeche never sounded quite so thick with its sound before, with synths arranged into a mini-orchestra/horn section and real piano and acoustic guitar spliced in at strategic points. Two tracks later, "Pipeline" offers the first clear hint of an increasing industrial influence (the bandmembers were early fans of Einstürzende Neubauten), with clattering metal samples and oddly chain gang-like lyrics and vocals. The album's clear highlight has to be "Everything Counts," a live staple for years, combining a deceptively simple, ironic lyric about the music business with a perfectly catchy but unusually arranged blending of more metallic scraping samples and melodica amid even more forceful funk/hip-hop beats. Elsewhere, on "Shame" and "Told You So," Gore's lyrics start taking on more of the obsessive personal relationship studies that would soon dominate his writing. Wilder's own songwriting contributions are fine musically, but lyrically, "preachy" puts it mildly, especially the environment-friendly "The Landscape Is Changing." ~ Ned Raggett
Having proven his abilities as a pop craftsman on the previous year's A BROKEN FRAME, DM main songwriter Martin Gore gets down to the business of developing a new sonic language for himself and his bandmates on CONSTRUCTION TIME. Earlier in its career, Depeche Mode tried to make its synthesizer-only arrangements seem warm and fuzzy, but here the band embraces the Kraftwerk-pioneered tradition of exploiting the synthesizer's inherent inorganic qualities for their intrinsic beauty.
In addition to straying further from the poppy approach of previous albums, the group incorporates industrial-oriented sounds as an important part of the arrangements, lending an ominous, machine-like tone to many of the songs. The once-chipper group's growing disenchantment with the outside world begins to flower here as well, most notably on the anti-music biz observations of "Everything Counts."

Q (8/95, pp.138-139) - 4 Stars - Excellent - "...Machine-made drums take on an ostentatious inventiveness, the themes (monetarism, deforestation, armageddon) are writ large..."