Revisit of the Week: Depeche Mode - Violator (1990)
This week's revisit isn't quite up to regulation standards - rather than hit CTRL+R in Music Collector and let fate decide, I deliberately picked Violator this week. There was a little bit of random chance involved, don't fret. A Discord server I'm in started a new rota of weekly community-driven album listens where each week a randomly picked participant chooses an album they hold dear to their heart and then people discuss and rate; I've avoided the game to date because I'm bad at forming opinions based on first impressions and I'm not sure I'll have the time, but I thought I'd give it a go. Violator has been this week's album and given the fact that 1) I own it and 2) I haven't spun it properly in a while, I figured I'd just kill two birds with one disc and choose it for my weekly revisit too.
The problem is that, admittedly, going into this week's post I wasn't sure what I'd write about. These posts are completely improvised on the spot with no revisions (beyond a quick typo check at the end, which even then I sometimes fail) or greater planning, and usually these go one of two ways. The first is a trip down to memory lane but there isn't much I can say about Violator in that respect: it was one of my first Depeche Mode albums and even now when I open the case I get flashbacks of doing that exact same thing in my teenage-year bedroom having just bought it from the local record store, but that's largely it and as you can tell, it's a story briefly told. The other route is to simply summarise how I feel about the album but the trouble is I've already done that quite extensively: I reviewed the album some years ago on RYM and though it's not my Official Final Word on the album (that'll happen when my review site gets a Depeche Mode page one day), I do stand by the majority of it and it requires little revision. I've stared at that review a lot over the past couple of days as I've been tailoring it as my final thoughts for the Discord game, ready to be presented in front of the class tomorrow, and I felt it'd be incredibly cheeky if I'd copy/paste it again for the purposes of this blog. Summa summarum, it's a great album, one of my favourites by the Deppy Modes and "Enjoy the Silence" is one of my favourite songs of all time.
No, the mental rabbit hole I've really fallen down this week is about how to score it. So, let's get unbearably meta.
I rate albums on a ten-point scale, and I tend to be quite strict about my ratings: I've tried to loosen up a little over the past couple of years as I've been doing my review site but I still have very firm feelings over what the borders between the different ratings are and where albums should fall in line inside them. For some people this is unfathomable and they think that numeric scoring is pointless: after all your opinion on any given piece of music can change massively depending on your mood and the context so it's not like your opinions are ever fixed, and trying to set a rigid ranking system to something you feel is mad to begin with. These people are absolutely correct. It is a folly - but it is my folly. I score things not because I think there is a strict ranking order to all music, but because it helps make sense of things in my head. I review and ramble music first and foremost to help me assess why these things make me feel the way I do - they are effectively conversations between instances of myself, laid down into a transcript that makes some sort of cohesive sense. Giving albums a point value helps with that process: it is effectively the final paragraph in this conversation that helps me map the album in a wider scale, assessing not just where it stands in the mental cartography but where it is in relation to other albums of the same "value", to answer the question of how much they have impacted me and in what way. It helps me to get into the nitty-gritty detail of my thoughts and acts as a guiding light to make things make more sense in my head - and at the same time it gives a rough idea of what I think to other people, who might not want to read several paragraphs of word salad explaining the same thing.
I have never looked into whether I have any degree of autism nor do I have any real desire to do so either, but I am also a huge Sonic the Hedgehog fan.
So the big question in my head that I've been tossing and turning around in my head this week is what level of ultimately arbitrary numeric rating do I give to Depeche Mode's Violator. On Rate Your Music I've currently got it down as a 8/10 - a great album, a stand-out I love returning to, one that's stood the test of time. But I did say I have been trying to loosen the border patrol between scores a little bit and I've had to ask myself, do I feel this is a nine? A nine is the top rating for most music for me because 10s are reserved for very special cases and I hand them out very, very rarely. A 9 is a real landmark record and there are valid reasons for Violator to hit that high - it has "Enjoy the Silence" for one, which as mentioned is simply one of the greatest songs ever recorded. Most of the album is understandably in its shadow but frequently great nonetheless, and even the one relative dud ("Sweetest Perfection") is not only still a good song, but it redeems itself very well in its instrumental second half as the song kicks up a notch (I think it's just bad track placement, really). Many of the songs conjure vivid feelings, memories and visual images in my head when they play which is always a sign of something that's had some degree of deeper impact, it has certainly stood the test of time and like said, it is one of DM's best albums - so a 9 feels right, right? But I think about other albums that I score that high and those feelings are more vivid, the mental images even clearer, and so forth. Does Violator reach those heights? Am I only wanting to score it higher because of perceived peer pressure to call this a classic, rather than simply following my own heart?
So I'll continue to stew on that. In the meantime, I hope you have enjoyed your brief trip to my mind, where inconsequential things such as these hog a surprising amount of mental space and which I sometimes find myself thinking so much that I really question whether I should take it so seriously and why. But I don't know. There's something about this level of petty nerdiness that I really enjoy, because - as mentioned - it really does kick me to consider where I stand on things, and most importantly why I think that way. It is all about that internal dialogue, for me.
Depeche Mode's Violator is a great album.
(And the Discord game allows .5 decimal ratings so I could just take the ultimate coward's route and go 8.5, like a freak)
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