David Gahan
Paper Monsters
On Sale Now
For $13.28

VIDEO
Dirty Sticky Floors - Windows Media / Low
Dirty Sticky Floors - Windows Media / High

Dave Gahan has risen from livewire Essex soulboy to globally adored rock’n’soul icon during more than two decades as one of pop’s most iconic frontmen. As the voice of Depeche Mode, Dave has become a hero to millions, hitting intense public highs and deep personal lows. But in all this time he never quite found the right emotional frame of mind to vent his true feelings on record. Until now.

Paper Monsters is Gahan’s first solo album, and finds the singer starting from scratch again. Composed with a multi-instrumentalist friend from New York, Knox Chandler, and produced by Ken Thomas of Sigur Ros fame, the album is a 21st century masterpiece of tones and textures, reflection and rebirth. Coming together organically in a small studio with a loose band of like-minded souls, these 11(12”) tracks have the freshness of a debut, but the seasoned wisdom of an old soul. For Dave, this open-ended, back-to-basics recording process was both liberating and exhilarating.

“What really hit me most was how happy and fulfilled it made me feel,” he nods. “This album is about feeling, and I wanted to hear something that makes me feel good. That’s been the train of thought throughout this record, and Ken’s been really great with that.”

Although Dave has fronted Depeche Mode for 22 years, Paper Monsters marks his debut as a full-fledged songwriter. Before now, career commitments, distractions and personal confidence barriers kept him from finding his true voice. “Hence the title of my album,” nods Dave, “because I’d created these monsters which have got bigger and bigger over the years. But in the last few years I realized that it’s only myself that has created them.”

The monsters in Dave’s emotionally naked songs make passing reference to his former appetites for destruction and addiction, now long conquered, but mostly to more everyday demons--from the agonies and ecstasies of long-term love to the heartbreaking euphoria of fatherhood.

But while sensual, sublime confessionals like “Hold On,” “A Little Piece,” and “Stay” may be lullabies of longing wrapped in chamber-music arrangements, the album’s prevailing mood is overwhelmingly positive. “It sounds hopeful because that’s what I am,” insists the rejuvenated singer. “I wanted it all to feel positive in that way. But “’Hold On’ especially, for me, has got a message of hope.”

Indeed, Paper Monsters is a musical journey where hope conquers hurt. According to Dave, “Bitter Apple” is about emotional rehab, about rediscovering the exquisite pain of love through his new wife, Jennifer. “The scariest moment for me was when I felt like I was soulless, and I’d lost all the ability to just dream and have hopes and goals. And she really was the beginning, for me. Jennifer opened my eyes and my heart again. That song’s for her, and about her.”

“Stay,” meanwhile, is a majestic hymn of quiet awe inspired by the birth of Dave and Jennifer’s daughter, Stella Rose. “When she was born it was like a big arrow went through my heart,” Dave recalls. “I really started to feel like my heart was beating again, or maybe I suddenly realized that it hadn’t been for a long time and I was suddenly open to that again.”

But Paper Monsters also has its dark, wasted, lustful side. From the meat-grinder glam racket of “Bottle Living,” featuring Dave’s own ragged blues harmonica, to the nightmarish Wizard Of Oz fantasy of “Dirty Sticky Floors,” the singer gives vent to the sleazy alter ego he half-jokingly calls Evil Dave: “that morbid, dark, fucked-up shit,” he laughs, “Essex Boy made good”.

But if this is an exorcism, at least Dave is now in a position to sing these tunes with self-mocking humor and twisted pop attitude. “ There are a lot of records now that are dark, but there’s no fun in them,” Dave says. “They don’t have that old pop sensibility like Mud or Slade, that real swagger. So I wanted that to come across in those two songs.” All of the album’s diverse emotional themes come together in “She Said (Goodbye),” a climactic bonfire of the vanities in which the narrator finds his way back a new understanding of love, life and loss. It’s an uplifting anthem about answered prayers, and spiritual reawakening. The death of the old Dave, the birth of the new.

“The most important thing to me was that all of the songs have a sense of humor, but at the same time a message of hope and faith,” Dave explains. “Because that’s all I feel that you really have in life anyway: the faith that, no matter how things work out, that is going to be how they’re supposed to be. That’s why I say this album has a life of its own, because I just put it out there, and now it’s developed into something that has given me a lot of faith in the future.”

A masterpiece of reflection, redemption and rebirth, Paper Monsters finds Dave Gahan at the peak of his powers, seizing the day and celebrating his unquenchable lust for life. “It’s like I’m waking up, and I’m realizing there’s been a hell of a lot given to me,” says Dave. “I’ve been given a lot of chances in my life and it’s time for me to take those gifts and do something with them. It’s all about freedom.”

Tracklisting:
1. Dirty Sticky Floors
2. Hold On
3. A Little Piece
4. Bottle Living
5. Black And Blue Again
6. Stay
7. I Need You
8. Bitter Apple
9. Hidden Houses
10. Goodbye

Dave Gahan Official Website:
http://www.davegahan.com

Copyright © 2010 ModernRock.com All Rights Reserved