Depeche new album face down the abyss
‘Memento Mori’ by Records) And then there were only two. Depeche Mode have always been a genre unto itself: a vibe, a sort of feedback loop that is timeless yet nostalgic, dark, edgy, a little too dark sometimes but always so cool. Their 15th studio album titled “Memento Mori” (Latin for “remember you will die”) feels both like a tribute to founding member and keyboardist Andy Fletcher who died in May 2022 and left them a duo (Dave Gahan and Martin Gore) and a mission statement of their music.
The 12 tracks are fully Depeche, fully intoxicating in sound, artistically evocative and sometimes puzzling (like the compelling but strange “Caroline’s Monkey”). The music is staring lovingly into the abyss and asking it to love it back; death is always hovering on the periphery of the sound, a grunge, industrial, rainy sound also filled with a strange kindness.
“Soul with Me” is an incredible ballad where Gahan’s voice changes to an unrecognizable pitch, while “Before We Drown” is an electro sexy tune, while “My Cosmos Is Mine” has a dramatic tempo to it that works. “Ghost Again” hooks you with its deep fry bass and “People are Good” engages the aural with an unusual vibrato.
Depeche Mode might be facing their own mortality but their power as musicians stretches into infinity. NEW YORK: LOS ANGELES:
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“With Love From,” Aly & AJ (Aly & AJ Music) Disney starlets-turned-indie sister duo Aly & AJ return with a new album, storytelling their way through a big American road trip into a ’70s dreamy and electric landscape through the sun kissed desert.
In the duo’s album, “With Love From,” they demonstrate their ability to make their familiar indie-pop sound reminiscent of a time in music where rock stars delivered subdued confessionals — longing for love or coming alive staying up all night on a tour bus traveling across the country.
The sisters sound stronger as they ever have as a duo as they let go of ’80s style-synth production to let their voices breathe on the more stripped down, folksy Americana-inspired 11-track album.
“With Love From” simply starts off with the country-infused track “Open to Something and That Something Is You.” The perfect song to serenade a lover, twinged with longing, desire and an open heart to love. “After Hours” is a folk song the duo wrote about the idle time that comes with being up at the late hours during their transient musician’s lifestyle.
“Blue Dress” takes a softer approach with the sisters singing close to their mics crooning that they’ve been missing and dreaming of their lover. “I don’t care who you’ve been kissing/Cause I’ve been doing some kissing too/I just care that you get here,” Aly & AJ sing.
Grounded in hearty acoustic guitars, sweeping drums and breathy vocals, the sisters sing from a place of confidence and self-assurance in one of the standout songs in the album, “Sunchoke”: “I’m on the run/I’m so mad at myself I could choke the sun/I feel the heat and it’s burning up the soles of my feet.”
They close out “With Love From” with the stripped-back songs “Baby Lay Your Head Down” and “6 Months of Staring Into the Sun.” The latter is a five-minute ballad accompanied by a piano about a drive through California with a lover: “Boots on the dashboard, laughing at nothing/You’re all I need, but we’re running on empty.”
The song bursts with drums and electric guitar in the last minute and the sisters sing “All that I need” on repeat until the metaphorical car they’re driving in glides into the sunset — perfectly encapsulating the end of a more subdued album from the duo that allowed them to create music to a larger bright and loving cinematic narrative.
Also:
The estate of rapper Coolio plans to release a studio album later this year that the Grammywinning hitmaker had been working on in the days before he died.
“Long Live Coolio” will be the first posthumous album release from the “Gangsta’s Paradise” star and the first single, “TAG ‘You It,’” dropped Friday featuring Too $hort and DJ Wino.
The raunchy single’s video - that begins with Coolio and Too $hort in a boxing ring as various women gyrate - marks the last piece of visual content Coolio appeared in before his death from cardiac arrest on Sept. 28, 2022, at age 59.
Coolio won a Grammy for best solo rap performance for “Gangsta’s Paradise,” the 1995 hit from the soundtrack of the Michelle Pfeiffer film “Dangerous Minds” that sampled Stevie Wonder’s 1976 song “Pastime Paradise” and was played constantly on MTV.
The rapper would never again have a song nearly as big as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” but had subsequent hits with “Fantastic Voyage” in 1994, “1, 2, 3, 4 (Sumpin’ New)” in 1996 and 1997’s “C U When U Get There.”
His career album sales totaled 4.8 million, with 978 million on-demand streams of his songs, according to Luminate. He would be nominated for six Grammys overall.
He starred in a reality show about parenting called “Coolio’s Rules,” provided a voice for an episode of the animated show “Gravity Falls” and performed the theme music for the Nickelodeon sitcom “Kenan & Kel.”
❑ ❑ ❑ Maybe some old-fashioned rock is more your speed? Look no further than hard-hitting, riff-heavy Theory of a Deadman, whose new album is “Dinosaur.” It was produced by Martin Terefe and recorded in Sweden at Atlantis Studios, made famous by ABBA. The 10-track collection from the quartet of Tyler Connolly, Dave Brenner, Dean Back and Joey Dandeneau includes the rocking title tune, the party song “Ambulance” — with the lyrics “cheap drinks/sticky floors/in my safe place” — and a reworking of the classic song “Just the Two of Us” with a darker hue called “Two Of Us (Stuck).” (AP)