Consumer Guide Album

Depeche Mode: Catching Up With Depeche Mode [Sire, 1985]
Their second half-assed compilation in a year and a half finally gets it half right, putting a single sleeve around their most tuneful technotopia and death-fluff. Granted, it omits their only actual U.S. hit, "People Are People," already reprised to bait the dire Some Great Reward, baiting instead with the previously un-American Everything Counts EP, which holds up indifferently in such select company, though the squishy "Fly on the Windscreen" bookends the blasphemous "Blasphemous Rumors" neatly enough. But the collection has a structure, proceeding chronologically from young technotopian romance to slightly older technodystopian despair. First they "Just Can't Get Enough," then they ponder "The Meaning of Love," then they doubt "Love in Itself," then they play "Master and Servant." The little girls understand. B+