ALBUM REVIEW

DEPECHE MODE

“Songs of Faith and Devotion”

Sire

* 1/2

Since heavy is in, the little blips and beeps and computery squiggles of sound that often carried Depeche’s techno-pop in the past will no longer do. But only on the lusty single “I Feel You,” with its feedback blizzards and edgy blues-guitar riff, does the band find a way to be convincingly heavy.

The rest of “Songs of Faith and Devotion” is merely ponderous. It would be hard to find singing more stilted, lugubrious and overacted than David Gahan’s performance here. Then again, songwriter Martin Gore hands him scenarios so overheated in their fairy-tale dark romanticism that Gahan is merely following the script.

Watch out especially for those songs of Faith: When Depeche draws upon a gospel influence for the stridently whining “Condemnation” and the enigmatically dogmatic “Get Right With Me,” it hammers out the swing and sway and siphons off the inward pang of feeling that a love of gospel might instill in a song.

Sometimes the band undergirds its weighty constructs with beats vaguely suggestive of hip-hop; “Rush” strives for industrial force, but it sounds as if Depeche Mode is driving one-inch nails. You’d think a band so incapable of the light or subtle touch would at least muster the daring to go to more interesting sonic extremes when it’s trying to be heavy.

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).