8/7/2023 0 Comments Paper monsters dave gahanOver earnest guitars and low-moaning harmonica, Gahan roars "He's living for the bottle," evidently recalling his own adventures in alcoholism from the safe remove of the third person.īy the next song, "Black and Blue Again", Dave's confessions take on a tinge of a master-and-servant game: Gahan might, just might, get off on self-flagellation, with the audience as the unwitting dominator. ![]() "Bottle Living" is a classic blues shuffle, not even transposed into a more British minor key (which "Personal Jesus" was). "Dirty Sticky Floors" is both the album's designated hit single and its most humble moment: by the end of the first verse, the protagonist is already on the titular floor "praying over the porcelain throne." After two timid ballads in a row- "Hold On" and "A Little Piece"- Gahan is seized by another bout of picturesque wallowing. Gahan opens Monstersin full masochistic mode. They were, and are, a gospel-tinged classic rock band that happened to favor au courant arrangements (as the legend goes, the boys switched to synths so as not to disturb neighbors during early rehearsals). Fair enough: much like the Eurythmics, Depeche Mode were never a true electropop outfit. ![]() The songs themselves, meanwhile, are two-thirds smoothly crooned ballads over one-third lacquered rock shuffles- all closer to the digi-soul of *Songs of Faith and Devotion than the IDM aspirations of * Exciter. Its presence here nears Bonnie Raitt levels, coating most solos and even providing ambient beds. The most prominently featured instrument on Paper Monsters is, oddly enough, slide guitar. The first thing we learn is that Dave doesn't really like synthesizers all that much. It's just another level of self-mythologizing, sure, but it does yield interesting information- sometimes not in the ways intended. Like many solo outings by career frontmen, Paper Monsters is autotherapeutic: Gahan wants to share something about himself. Why the hell am I making a point of this? Well, it's quite indicative of the album's contents. He also looks like a rather prototypical Jew. He looks like he should at this point: a man with 22 years' celebrity and six minutes of clinical death behind him. One of the premier prettyboys of the 80s, Gahan looks defiantly middle-aged here- the jowls sag a bit, the corners of the mouth took a mournful turn downward.
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