Dave Gahan & Soulsavers - ANGELS AND GHOSTS Album Review

Rating: 8/10

Depeche MoDe’s venerable singer anD stoke’s best-connecteD proDuction teaM reunite for a seconD albuM of heavy soul-searching. they won’t let you Down


The clue’s in the title: Angels And Ghosts. It’s as if production duo Rich Machin and Ian Glover hadn’t made their intentions clear enough by calling themselves Soulsavers. Not that anyone expects Gahan – who, when discussing his 1996 drug overdose, once claimed, “my screaming soul floated above me” – to collaborate on a collection of pop ditties about bunnies, but he and his new musical soulmates clearly mean to make no secret of the fact that their second collaboration finds the Depeche Mode singer addressing the “darker side of myself, which torments me” against a largely ominous backdrop. The boys have perfected their vocabulary, and now they’re going to use it. That said, this isn’t an album devoted solely to doom-laden hand-wringing. In fact, so joyful are Gahan’s epiphanies that opener Shine – which begins with the rattle of slide guitars and uplifting gospel harmonies – sounds as if it could have dropped off Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. The choir also make their presence felt on All Of This And Nothing, in which Gahan moves “from the dark” to a chorus in which he’s become “the sun that rises while you’re sleeping”, and Don’t Cry, a slow-paced rocker full of crunchy guitars and reassurances that “it’ll be alright”. But the choir is equally apparent on the stark Lately, in which, over little more than resonant guitars and piano, Gahan lays bare the emptiness of his soul, and on the desolate strains of The Last Time, which reveals that Jesus “lives in downtown LA/ He’s coming, he’ll be here”. Redemption, you see, could always be around the corner. It’s certainly close on One Thing, the album’s centrepiece, where, with his voice exposed and vulnerable thanks to the song’s simple piano and string arrangement, Gahan laments the possibility of a happiness that remains – for now – out of reach. In the end, the mood remains anguished, as on You Owe Me, whose atmosphere – with Gahan declaring that “there’s nowhere left to hide”– is so close to funereal that you’d think they’d hired The Bad Seeds. Angels And Ghosts offers an opportunity to hear Gahan in a fresh environment, one that may at times recall Depeche Mode, but – thanks to its non-electronic setting – never mimics it. The devil, perhaps, is in that detail.