[.ca] Hourglass

From Amazon.com:
Despite walloping a ruinous heroin habit that left him clinically dead for a few minutes a decade ago, Dave Gahan's first solo outing, 2003's Paper Monsters, was most notable for its utter lack of self-confidence. You couldn't really blame him for sounding a bit tentative--the lean Depeche Mode frontman had spent the previous 25 years singing other people's songs. On Hourglass, however, Gahan finally comes into his own, taking the grimy synth-rock blueprint of his 50 million album-selling band and customizing it with his own swaggering touch. He proves just as passionate meditating over lovely mood pieces, such as "Miracles," as he does lending his well-worn howl to noir-ish rock anthems like "Kingdom," through it all sounding more alive than he has in years. --Aidin Vaziri

Dark pleasures.:
Wikipedia:... "Hourglass", the second solo album by David Gahan of Depeche Mode... It is the follow up to his 2003 solo debut album "Paper Monsters" and was co-produced (and assisted by) Andrew Phillpott and Christian Eigner, who co-wrote all the songs with Gahan. (They also co-wrote his three Depeche Mode songs on "Playing the Angel".) Phillpott played guitar and Eigner played drums. Tony Hoffer mixed the album. The album is said to be more electronic than "Paper Monsters". It was leaked on the internet before its release...". Well, Dave Gahan continues his renaissance. He was frustrated because he couldn't get his songs on Depeche Mode albums, so he made his solo debut, "Paper Monsters", as an open letter to the band's songwriter, Martin Gore. It was reasonably successful, and didn't sound like Gore's work, proving that Gahan was a decent songwriter and his own man. Result: Gahan got three songs on the last Depeche Mode album. And now this. Another album staking out more of his own territory? Nope, a solo album that sounds like a Depeche Mode album. Feeling that age is racing against him, he recorded his second solo album in just less than eight weeks in his New York apartment. Considering the lengthy periods his band spend making albums, this is speedy work indeed but the pace of the music seldom raises itself above funereal. Deep, deathly bass synths with notes that last an eternity are only broken by the clank of industrial metal and Gahan's remarkable vocals, which fill in occasional gaps in the songwriting. It's hardly going to win over any wavering fans but the album has dark pleasures, slow though they are to reveal themselves - the macabre denseness parts for the excellent "Kingdom" -- to some critics this track is stronger than anything the Mode have done recently -- while "A Little Lie" feels like every David Lynch soundtrack condensed into five minutes. The sophomore outing from a man who, at his drug-addled nadir in 1996, was pronounced clinically dead for two minutes, is full of swagger. It's a doomy swagger. Gahan's baritone hovers over a musical landscape of icy synths and industrial clatter. But though his lyrics, which suggest a desire to turn bad relationships around, can verge on the adolescent - "I'm building a tower of fear by the river", he sings on "21 Days", like a delusional trick or treater - his ear for a fidgety groove prevents the music from lapsing into ambient pretentiousness. There's a kind of magnificence, a sweeping keyboard grandeur, majestic rhythms and hymns to the lowlife. A return from "Paper Monsters" grungy guitars to uncompromising electronica works very well, elevating Gahan's thoughts into kind of icy symphonies and inducing sometimes goosebumps. "Ten superb slices of cutting-edge electronica, dosed liberally with a guitar sound straight from the 1980s; the album slithers around outsider influences on a trip from Bowie's Berlin decadence, via David Sylvian's Japan, to the sordid back alleyways of Marc Almond's Soho" (BBC).

• Saw Something
• Kingdom
• Deeper And Deeper
• 21 Days
• Miracles
• Use You
• Insoluble
• Endless
• A Little Lie
• Down