In the end, the concert was only part of the story. Bands, songs, or even moments in songs will regularly become forever linked with events in your life. If not, then you're not listening carefully enough. Stop listening to music regularly. Find a new hobby. Spend your money and time elsewhere.
Even before my department scheduled my Ph.D. defense for the day after their concert at the ACC, Depeche Mode were already my favourite band ever. I've lost interest in loads of bands over the years, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. Some of them were even present or former inner circle heroes. These things happen for countless reasons -- sometimes they break up or made a crap album, causing me to temporarily lose interest in them. Sometimes (probably more often than I would like) there are no good reasons for it. A band falls through the cracks in my attention span, becomes lost in the shuffle of a million other names, and don't pique my interest again for months, years, or forever.
None of that has ever happened with Depeche Mode. I didn't need to link any more important life events to this band. The first concert I ever saw was Depeche Mode at Exhibition Stadium in 1990. I have the wrinkled, faded Violator $30 concert t-shirt to prove it. I've known my friend Sandra for over half my life and I've never seen her happier than those four minutes during which Depeche Mode played "A Question of Time" in the encore of their summer 1994 show. "Enjoy the Silence" is my favourite single of the 90's. It's enough already! I don't deserve any more of this!
Just then, reality came calling and (quantum?) entangled yet another Depeche Mode Mode into my everyday life. This is my biggest challenge ever, isn't it? Someone's trying to tell me to get off my ass, stop being afraid of a few tens of thousands of words on a page and the threat of a few professors berating me for a couple of hours, bring my A-game, and GET SHIT DONE. Do it my own way. Is anybody surprised that I'm going to this show? No, they're not. Nobody else is dumb enough to do this but me. This is monumentally stupid, isn't it? My favourite band comes to town the night before the culmination of a billion years of work. It all goes down in about a sixteen hour span. It's not about the show. It's not. If it wasn't the show, I'd still be home, studying the same page of equations for the 100th time, wishing that I had a couple more days to prepare. I'll never feel fully prepared. One thing is for certain though: I'm not looking forward to this show, because once it's over, that means ...
The Raveonettes have the thankless task of playing while people were still filing in and milling around outside. Unfortunately, their intimate harmonies are easily ignored in a large venue like this, and the volume necessary to experience their Wall of Sound approach evaporates while travelling to the seats in the upper level. But none of this prevents "Twilight" -- their "Disco 2000" moment -- from being exhilirating.
Their synths are sitting atop platforms that might have been hauled off the set of a 50's sci-fi movie. The elaborate video screens and projections from past tours are pared down to a more basic setup that mainly showed closeups of the band members performing, with the odd animation thrown in to mix things up. It's like they want to be a real rock band now and are bored of standing stoically around their keyboards listening to another man sing (hoarsely) while cartoons play in the background (yes, it's 2005, why do you ask?). What is there to look at now besides Martin Gore's black leather pants and black frilly angels wings?
Duh. Look at the band, listen to the pleasantly energetic crowd (a marked improvement over the thousands of bored and boring asshats who flocked to their last two Toronto gigs), and experience their best album in fifteen years played at full volume. "A Pain That I'm Used To" feels scaled back in comparison to its "Reptile"-ified album version, but "John the Revelator" is tight, funky, perfect. As the intro to "A Question of Time"-soundalike "Suffer Well" hits, I become excited at the notion that this will be one of those gigs where the band plays a swath of their new album in its normal playing order before switching to the old stuff ... whoops, this IS "A Question of Time" after all. That was clever. I tip my hat.
"Policy of Truth" has been the odd single out of the "Violator" quartet on a couple of other tours, but tonight it nearly outshines all of them. The gold continues to flow with "Precious", a slamming version of "Walking In My Shoes" (I have never particularly enjoyed this song on record, but live, it breathes fire into me), "Suffer Well" for real this time ... this set is flawless, peak after peak after peak. Crazy Heroin Dave is dead. Long live Happy Fun Dave, the guy who has honed his voice into a instrument that's twice as powerful as his predecessor despite consuming only half as much air.
The pace finally slows down and it's time for the more sedate portion of the gig when Martin Gore sings. The delicacy of "Damaged People" is like banging on pipes and watching them twinkle. I don't know how they did it, but they perfected "Construction Time Again" twenty years after the fact. This song easily outclasses the schmaltzier "Home" and Dave's brooding "I Want It All". I could complain that they should have gone full-scale gothic right here and played "Nothing's Impossible" instead, because that might have snapped me out of a temporary trance where my thoughts drifted off into the expected events of the following morning ...
Everything snaps back into focus with "I Feel You", and finally the entire arena becomes unglued during the opening bars of "Behind The Wheel". People who were grooving in their seats suddenly leap to their feet, those who were already standing briefly lose control of their limbs before latching onto the beat. "World In My Eyes" is followed by perennial set closers "Personal Jesus" and "Enjoy the Silence", the latter now incorporating drum (!) and guitar (!!) solos to extend its excellence for a minute or two longer.
At this point, the crowd's overall mood is one of exhaustion. Swapping "Behind The Wheel" with one of the songs in the encore might have kept the energy level through the roof right until the end, but that would be nitpicking. After a return to the 80's with resurrected hits "Somebody", "Just Can't Get Enough" and "Everything Counts", they return for a second encore of "Never Let Me Down Again" that feels nearly anticlimatic now. Almost in recognition of that fact, "Goodnight Lovers" serves as the cooldown phase. This little anodyne lullaby is one of their most underrated singles, and it's a refreshing change to see a Depeche concert close on such a mellow note, lights dimmed, soothing harmonies, soft blue glow.
A career of increasingly complex and elaborate tours have given way to a more basic stage setup that thrives on the basis of little more than an exhaustive back catalogue littered with excellence. U2? Say what? Depeche Mode are trumping some of the best new music of their career with some of the finest concerts of their career. Now, as I walk and ride home in the rain, my last obstacle is gone. The concert is over. I could always say that the concert came first. I guess it's all me now.
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