Vince Clarke and Martin Gore might have conquered the world together as members of Depeche Mode's original lineup, which held together for just one album, 1981's Speak and Spell. (They conquered it anyway, separately.) The clashing aesthetics that probably provoked the split are all too apparent when you compare Speak and Spell (written largely by Clarke) with the music Depeche Mode's made for the last 30 years (written mostly by Gore). Speak and Spell is blithe, bright, and bouncy, qualities Clarke took to projects like Yaz and Erasure, which scored huge when he combined this bubblegummy synth-pop with over-the-top emoting and a little ersatz soul. Depeche Mode went for synth music's darker strains, turning it into digital stadium rock, draping themselves in leather and chains, delivering all that campy S&M imagery and religious mania and gaunt raunch with a much-needed wink.
What initially brought them together was a love of electronic music and a yearning for stardom. The latter was what made their music pop, of course, turning their work (together and apart) into one of the key transition points from post-punk keyboard freaks tinkering in their bedrooms to synthesizer-wielding pretty boys taking over the airwaves. While their music may have reveled in new technological toys, as synths moved from expensive and inaccessible to the realm of consumer electronics, their delivery was pure showbiz, whether we're talking Clarke's Broadway brassiness or Gore's grim-but-cuddly goth melodrama. But it's that lifelong infatuation with beats and bleeps that's brought them back together, three decades after "Just Can't Get Enough", as VCMG, with 10 tracks of the kind of fierce, instrumental, no-bullshit techno that was as left-field popular in 1988 as 1998 as 2008. It's often witty, with a kind of robots-running-amok charm, and always attention-grabbing, at least in small doses. But friendly it ain't.
On the one hand, their timing seems perfect, since instrumental dance music is enjoying a level of almost unprecedented mass-cult saturation in America. On the other hand, Ssss is appearing at a time when dance fans both overground and underground have violently veered away from the scorched-earth minimalism of VCMG tracks like "Aftermaths", whether it's indie kids running toward early-1990s pop house or Hot Topic habitués headbanging to Skrillex's screamo-meets-Aphex. Which isn't to say that there are no of-the-moment touches. "Bendy Bass" is six minutes of queasy wobble-- one hesitates to call it a "drop" since it practically consumes the whole track-- that doesn't recall dubstep so much as recent dubstep's debts to techno. But the overall vibe is more the-sound-of-six-or-seven-years-ago than hot-hits-of-just-last-week. If Ssss had come out in 2005, when hip producers were reviving the punishment of stiff electro riffs and exploring the bombed-out terrain of the darkest Detroit techno, it might have seemed like old pop stars bandwagon-jumping, and probably been as flimsy as you'd expect. In 2012, it feels like that rarest of side projects, two famous dudes exploring a sound they love for the hell of it, regardless of its commercial potential, with an intensity to match.
Since they no longer have to long for fame, having become Flashback Lunch Hour staples on various FM radio formats and revered grandpa figures in a number of subcultures, they don't need to offer a mass audience an easy way "in." And so the instrumental throbscapes of Ssss are stark and forbidding in a way that even Depeche Mode's flirtations with minimal techno weren't, since they at least had Dave Gahan doing his defiled-altar-boy routine. Anyone looking for the karaoke-grade choruses of something like Erasure's "A Little Respect" will instead find themselves sucked into a black hole of sub-woofer abuse, implacable drums, and a few synth frills with all the warmth of the earliest acid-house architects. For guys who can seem emblematic of the Big 80s, and all of the sleek dance-rock accessibility that implies, these tracks are far more likely to remind you of essentialist techno don Robert Hood, at least if Robert Hood ever deigned to be entertaining.
Because even after they scrape their music clean of pop and pare things down to the metronomic essentials, they still can't hide the fact that they were born to make music that sounds as big as possible. If most 21st-century minimal techno fetishized restraint and control to the point of boring you, Clarke and Gore keep the compositional scrupulousness while making things huge and bold and unignorable. In other words, it's not the dance equivalent of a Michael Bay movie, like the output of the post-Skrillex crew, but it's also not a Bresson flick, like the work of so many German dance tinkerers. The problem is, as usual, that an hour's worth of minimal instrumental anything, however loud and slamming, has the potential to wear you down rather than suck you in, and Clarke and Gore don't entirely escape that trap here. After a few tracks of nothing but boom and tick and woosh, non-technophiles may find themselves longing for the more "obvious" pleasures of Upstairs at Eric's or Violator. But the one thing you can't say about Ssss is that it's uncommitted, and after decades of quickie cash-in collaborations between long-estranged old bandmates, that in itself is its own kind of pleasure.
