Having been Depeche Mode's sole songwriter for more than 20 years, Martin Gore evidently fancies a break. While his colleague Dave Gahan has embarked on an intensely personal solo record, Gore plumps for the most inconsequential of options: the covers album. In the process, he demonstrates why Gahan usually does most of the singing.
On the first Counterfeit, a six-track EP released in 1989, Gore tailored the material - delicate obscurities by the Comsat Angels and the Durutti Column - to suit his slight, tender voice.
This time he is stretching the voice in directions it doesn't want to go. Anyone who sounds like Gore should never, ever, not even for a bet, cover a Nick Cave song, but he does.
The balance is redressed elsewhere, as he beautifully inhabits Julee Cruise's In My Other World and turns Hank Thompson's I Cast a Lonesome Shadow into a surprisingly effective electro-country oddity, but surely even Gore doesn't expect this likably hobbyish outing to reach beyond Depeche Mode's hardcore fanbase.
