(Mute/EMI)

The recent release of Depeche Mode’s album ‘Playing The Angel’ (their eleventh studio album in total) has coincided with a marked increase in the level of interest surrounding the Basildon-born synth stadium act, with ‘Playing The Angel’ hailed as a return to form after two slightly disappointing previous albums that had served to highlight just how much of a hole was left in the Mode after original member and sound designer Alan Wilder departed following 1993’s ‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion.’ Perhaps even more significantly however, ‘Playing The Angel’ represents the first time that chief songwriter Martin Gore has loosened his tight control on the band’s songs, allowing singer Dave Gahan to contribute three tracks to the finished tracklisting (a factor no doubt spawned on by the release of Gahan’s own self-penned ‘Paper Monsters’ solo album). This third single to be lifted from ‘Playing The Angel’, ‘Suffer Well’, selects what seems to be unanimously agreed to be Gahan’s strongest track from the album, and then invites a stellar selection of current ‘hot’ names, including Tiga, Alter Ego and French synth-prog rocker M83 to the table for remix duties – in this case, the rather expansive album-length promo I have seems to represent a collation of the total number of mixes that will no doubt appear scattered over the various single formats.

Montreal synth pop poster-boy Tiga and frequent collaborator Jesper Dahlback open proceedings here with a streamlined and stripped-down tech-house reworking that places tribal-sounding house rhythms beneath shimmering epic synths and Gahan’s soaring delayed-out soul vocals whilst squiggling acid 303s and analogue synth bleeps lifted from the original mix flit above the rhythms alongside some icily bare piano chords that reveal the goth-tinged heart lurking at the centre of the song. Alongside its vocal-less dub counterpart, it’s certainly the strongest of the ‘big room’ remixes featured here and fares far better here with its tasteful use of space than Narcotic Thrust’s barnstorming reworking, which ventures swiftly towards the nastiest regions of commercial ‘Gatecrasher’-style trance, cheese-loaded synth arpeggios in tow. Alter Ego play the wild card here with a downtempo rockist reworking that places clicking metronomic beats beneath fuzzed-out, heavily processed guitars and icily elegant synths, and in this case, the duo certainly score points for being sensitive to the original song in their approach and heightening the sense of drama, rather than simply going for a tried-and tested ‘Rocker’-style outing.

Metope turn out to be the real surprise here, contributing two excellent reworkings of ‘Suffer Well’ that veer things towards the dark mechanical techno territory recently explored by Matthew Dear under his Audion alias (though there are certainly far more light shades used and even some sense of sliding electro-keyboard funk towards the end), while M83 lays on the analogue synths and reshapes the track into a glittering nocturnal prog-laden voyage that threatens to explode but never quite does, M83’s own soaring falsetto vocals adding an extra European element as retro drum machine rhythms and skittering sampled fragments roll through the mix. Finally, the slightly mysterious Basteroid rework non-album B-side ‘Better Days’ into a dark piece of rattling techno, looming sub-bass swells carving a path beneath Gahan’s doomy distorted vocals, while digitally-contorted buzzes and relentless snares hammer the speakers – happy stuff, it surely is not, but if you’re a fan of the Mode, you’re bound to be familiar with the territory.

Another strong single from the Mode’s recent ‘Playing The Angel’ album that manages to pack in a certainly extensive selection of mixes that predominantly lean towards 4/4 beats – depending on your individual tastes, you may want to sift through the various single formats that make their way out there.

Check out http://www.depechemode.com.