Word: modelied
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When you look at a Watteau fete champetre, an Impressionist boating party or certain Matisses, you are seeing the long-range results of Titian's and Giorgione's invention of the pastoral mode in art: the landscape of pleasure, the earthly paradise derived from Latin literature, with its shepherds, gallants and nymphs. The picture that starts this long train is Titian's Concert Champetre, circa 1509, which is one of the most hermetic and disputed images in all Western art. It gets about 27 columns of dense text in the catalog, chewing over its literary sources, the presence...
PERFORMER: DEPECHE MODE...
...TIME WHEN NEW AGE SEEMS old, postmodern seems prehistoric and the anti- Establishment energy of grunge rock is being packaged and marketed like so many Cheez Doodles, Depeche Mode's musical vision of the future already seems a thing of the past: too-cool-to-care vocals, lyrics like something off an answering machine at a suicide hotline, industrial-strength dance grooves as unforgiving as capitalism itself. In retrospect, many of the band's angst- laden hits -- Master and Servant, Fly on the Windscreen -- now seem so terribly '80s, dispassionate, cold and metallic. Music written by androids, produced by cyborgs...
...with its new album, Depeche Mode has found faith. At its core, this is still the same band that was behind such antireligious hits as Personal Jesus and Blasphemous Rumours, but on Songs of Faith and Devotion, the group uses sacred symbols to add emotional weight to its typically secular songcraft, dropping words like heaven, soul and Babylon and such phrases as golden gates, kingdom comes and angels sing. Religious terms used to drive home a nonreligious point? Clearly this English alternative rock band is seeking a new covenant with its fans...
This is a slickly produced, highly listenable album, but there is in the end a certain failure of nerve. The kind of belief that Depeche Mode places at the core of these faux faith songs actually requires the kind of deep commitment that the band seems unwilling or unable to make. The gospel-tinged Get Right with Me cuts off before it culminates, just as the music and singing are reaching a climax. In other songs, the scanning of religious symbols becomes a numbing succession, like a bored teenager channel-surfing cable networks. Judas the betrayer...