It was so unexpected, but not really. We knew they could fill arenas (we meaning us, the faithful, the ones who adore them and shall ever adore them -- we are pure, we are holy, we love with a fierce love ever after), so going ahead and creating an arena rock album shouldn't have been that surprising. And even when everyone thought "I Feel You" was somehow their grunge song -- well, no. Not the way the bass pulses echo from speaker to speaker, the fragile keyboards fill in behind the beat (and when the beat fully crashes in after the first chorus, it's a fine thing), the wracked backing vocals, David Gahan upfront with a weirdly tender side to the aggressiveness, the concluding guitar loop. That's not grunge, that's what happens when a band with a perfect ear for what's around them borrows all the right elements and reassembles them just as they need them.
The sessions for Songs were by all accounts completely thrashed. Everyone holed up in their own rooms and locales, Flood and Alan Wilder assembling everything together as they could (and further proving just how utterly simpatico and sharp they were as a production team, how their ear for arranging pushes every button just right), hate and loathing in the air. "Walking in My Shoes" apparently was the focus of particular arguments; nobody agrees that the final version is what they wanted. And yet all I hear is the way the strings creep in and around the chorus, like ominous warning signals, until hitting the end of the song, or the way Martin Gore's E-bowing on guitar turns everything into sad siren sounds, forgiveness and death wrapped in equal, strange measure. Is it any surprise that Tricky eventually covered a song from this album? Not really, the more I think about it. Or that Massive Attack ended up created Mezzanine either -- Blue Lines may have come before it, but Mezzanine could have only happened after Songs.
It doesn't perfectly hold -- near the end things collapse a touch, "Rush" proving little more that somebody had listened to Nine Inch Nails a lot recently, which given Reznor's own abject worship before the temple of Mode was a bit ironic. Points for credit for "One Caress" and the string arrangement backing Gore's vocals, ever the underappreciated secret weapon of Depeche, and "Higher Love" ends things on a not bad note, strange crashes and reaches for the beyond.
But it's the first six songs in particular, and oh man. "Condemnation" goes gospel in a way that plays with all the signifiers, increasing the volume, stripping out almost all of the backing vocals but not quite, leaving just enough, I-stand-accused lyrics everywhere, Gahan pulling out the vocal stops pretty damn well, claps and croons and distorted piano, and not even Spiritualized could record something quite like it, really. And then there's "Mercy In You" with its guitar groove and beat and oh that second verse structure, those haunting sweet backing vocals floating somewhere out in the ozone, a perfect sudden sheen over the heavy mechanistic clatter, keyboards twisted in odd directions, and then there's "Judas," said song Tricky covered, slowly creeping along to its big wash and pulse of an end, Gore pondering in just the right way, orchestrations and uillean pipes in equal measure, and why not?
"In Your Room," meanwhile, is it. It is the business. Gore outdoes the entire Spacemen 3 collective, to talk about them again, in creating a triple-layered lyric (a rejected god to a worshipper, one lover to another, even Depeche to the fans -- who knows which it is, or if it's all of them and more), and it starts with the low bass burbles, a spectral mock choir, Gahan singing, then it just builds, and builds, and builds, and by the time it's over you can feel 80,000 seat stadia quaking, and there they all are, "hanging on your words, waiting on your breath."
In the supposed midst of early 90s grunge/alt popularity, it debuted at number one, this album. We knew. We always did.