Having proven his abilities as a pop craftsman on the previous year's a broken frame, dm main songwriter martin gore gets down to the business of developing a new sonic language for himself and his bandmates on construction time. earlier in its career, depeche mode tried to make its synthesizer-only arrangements seem warm and fuzzy, but here the band embraces the kraftwerk-pioneered tradition of exploiting the synthesizer's inherent inorganic qualities for their intrinsic beauty. in addition to straying further from the poppy approach of previous albums, the group incorporates industrial-oriented sounds as an important part of the arrangements, lending an ominous, machine-like tone to many of the songs. the once-chipper group's growing disenchantment with the outside world begins to flower here as well, most notably on the anti-music biz observations of "everything counts".
