Martin L. Gore in weird emotional chords

The main songwriter and one of the founder members of Depeche Mode, Martin L. Gore release of ‘Counterfeit2’, is the second album in his counterfeit cover-version series, 13 years after the first one. Classic tunes by Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, Kurt Weill, David Essex and John Lennon are among the disc’s eleven radically reworked homages to musical heroes, vintage and otherwise.

As Depeche Mode took time out following their monstrously successful ‘Exciter’ album and world tour, Martin could easily have spent the last 18 months lying on a beach, listening to disco music. But instead he knuckled down at his home studio in California, revisiting and reinventing songs that have touched him deeply over the years. “Without some of the artists I’ve covered here, I wouldn’t be writing the way I do,” Gore justifies his choice.

It is suggested that ‘Counterfeit2’ uncovers the roots of why Martin became a musician in the first place and Gore’s teenage tastes clearly ranged free, wide and wild: from Brian Eno’s ‘By This River’ to a techno-glam overhaul of post-fame burnout anthem ‘Stardust’, the weirdest David Essex tune ever to grace the Top 10. Martin is, after all, pop’s original Essex boy.

A compelling post-lounge twist on Iggy Pop’s ‘Tiny Girls’ gives way to a streamlined, softly oscillating version of John Lennon’s ‘Oh My Love’. And a sleek, German-language version of Nico’s Teutonic torchlight serenade ‘Das Lied Vom Einsamen Madchen’ (‘The Song of The Lonely Girl’), contrasts sharply with a reading of The Velvet Underground’s ‘Candy Says’, which Martin fatefully describes as “more drugged out than the original”.

In choosing the tracks for ‘Counterfeit2’, Martin has also dug deep into musical history, adding a sensual electronic sheen to the vintage country-blues tunes ‘I Cast A Lonesome Shadow’ and ‘In My Time Of Dying’. But the album’s most straightforward and traditionally romantic number finds Martin crooning desolately over piano and strings on Kurt Weill’s deceptively jolly hymn to a godless universe, ‘Lost In The Stars’. (Probably the best bit of this rather dreary album.)

As well as nodding to the past, the disc acknowledges some of Martin’s leftfield pop peers, such as label-mate Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ lusty blues howler ‘Lover Man’, here reborn as a sexually charged trip-hop juggernaut of manicured malevolence. But the disc’s beautific peak is ‘In My Other Word’, Julee Cruise’s fragrant, David Lynchian fable about a parallel universe where our ident-selves are enjoying perfect lives. (One supposes that there are no cover versions of any kind?)

“I’ve no big commercial ideas about ‘C2’ – I don’t expect it will sell that many as it’s not a commercial sound. I’d be surprised if it’s a huge success,” Martin commented in a recent interview.

One of the reasons may be that people don’t like artists’ indulging into messin’ with the original (sonic) memories.

6/10