REVIEWS:
I think it says a lot about our differing musical outlooks that Robert Grazer's the guy on this site who reviewed the atmospheric, deadly-serious classic postpunk band Joy Division and I'm the one reviewing the catchy disco synthpop band that rose from their ashes once Ian Curtis killed himself. Duality is one of the most important facets of the wannabe music critic trade. To be honest, I don't know a lot about New Order. When I first heard their name, I assumed that they were a rap band since they had a name that sounded like "New Edition," even though New Edition were about as rap as a hypothetical musical collaboration between Pat Boone, Neil Diamond and the guy who wrote the "Facts Of Life" theme song. Instead, they play a sort of mix between jangle-rock and synth-pop which can be absolutely glorious if it wants to and just as often amongst the most boring things I've ever heard in my life. You might know them from their hit singles "How Does It Feel," "Every Time I See You Falling" and "The Morning Sun," none of which are the actual titles of the songs in question, but these Manchester folk are of the type that like to give songs names which aren't in the actual lyrics but only vaguely relate to the song's general theme, because they're smarter than you are.
--Rich Bunnell
Post your comments about New Order
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Alright, I admit that I don't really fully understand Joy Division's bleak proto-goth vision at this point in my musical evolution, and that's why I haven't made the mistake of trying to review them yet, but in spite of this, I am able to recognize a third-rate carbon copy of them from a mile away. With the Div, at least I understand that underneath the initially apparent lack of hooks that my catchy beat-loving ears try to identify as a flaw, between the lines there're layers of musical and lyrical subtext that I merely haven't recognized yet. With this album, however, there is absolutely nothing besides what lies on the painfully obvious synth-goth surface. Most of the songs are barren early-'80s murky synthy wastelands, with guitarist-turned-lead singer Bernard Sumner testing out his best Ian Curtis impression, which ends up being roughly equivalent to a mumble which can barely be heard anyway since it's processed to hell and buried beneath fourteen layers of gloomy nothingness. Imagine the vocal tone that he would later take on "Blue Monday," only not backed up by any interesting music at all.
Calling these songs bad would be mistaking my boredom for hatred -- they're just astonishingly unmemorable in almost every aspect I can think of. The opener "Dreams Never End" manages to stand out from the pack, but even that is more due to its position on the album rather than being a really striking song, and its similarity to the band's heavily superior debut single "Ceremony" doesn't really help. I'm trying to think of things to say about the other songs, but I honestly can't - my mind has notions of how "Truth" and "Denial" and "The Him" and "ICB" sound, but I can't really put them into words beyond vague descriptors like "the one with the sorta groovy synth bassline" or "the boring one that gets kinda fast about halfway through." I'm not pouring cups of rotted jackalope intestines all over this album because I'm an overwhelmingly negative person who loves trashing things - I just really don't see why this album had to exist. The band knew that they couldn't go on milking the Joy Division sound without Ian Curtis, or else they wouldn't have gone and called themselves "New Order." They would've called themselves "Joy Division Mk II" or something This album is historically interesting as a transition between the sounds of the two bands, but in itself it doesn't really amount to much.
Post your comments / reviews for this album
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This album is an undeniable step up from Movement since the members of the band seem to have stopped their nightly Ian Curtis seances (complete with smores) in the recording studio and actually mapped out an identifiable sound, but some people go a little bit far and label it as New Order's all-time peak. I honestly can't agree - the songs on here are mostly more clearly-defined and memorable than the ones on the previous album, but that glaring monotony is still present, looming over the proceedings in a faceless, deadly Dr. Klaw sort of way. In other words, it's a step up in that I actually get the feeling that living human beings at some point sat down and wrote these songs with the full intent of eventually having an actual band play them, but the songs themselves are overall still sort of flat and uninvolving. This is as good a point as any to mention that though New Order has definitely had its peaks over the years, I've never really found them to be a consistently entertaining band - when they're not flooring me with pop melodies that would both enchant me and get me on the dance floor if I could dance, they usually just sort of sit around in a rut filled with bleepy bloopy beeps and jangle-rock guitars, all of which are pretty easy on the ears, especially when coasting along on a catchy synthesized beat and all, but don't really end up doing much of anything musically.
Most of the songs on this album are firmly stuck in this rut - they manage to hitch a saddle on this formula and ride it to success on a song like "Age Of Consent" since they actually bother to come up with a decent watery riff and counterpoint it with a beautiful, airy synth hook, but then the same formula breaks down on songs like "Leave Me Alone" which, in addition to being not nearly as good as the Michael Jackson song of the same name (which rules), is just more of the same without any cool melodies or instrumental parts to battle the vapid dullness. Once again, I'd have to be in a particularly bad mood to label any of the songs as bad, but aside from "Age Of Consent" and "Your Silent Face," a ballad whose restrained gorgeousness is only slightly marred by its corny synthesized rhythm section, not much on the album impresses me. "5 8 6" is pretty interesting in that it starts out as a murky instrumental and then suddenly shifts into a synth-popper which sounds like a blueprint for "Blue Monday," but I'd still rather listen to "Blue Monday" since it seems to do a whole lot more with the formula. I'm just not in love with everything else - either it's further milkings of the aforementioned jangle-beats sound like "The Village" or songs like "We All Stand" that improve on the Movement formula with the benefit of fuller production values, but still aren't all that great. Repeated listens reveal some hidden charms in the material, and it's a lot more in-your-face enjoyable than the debut, but I'm still not all that fond of it.
Post your comments / reviews for this album
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Now this is the New Order I like. The first two albums were dotted with little fragmented appealing qualities that made them somewhat worthwhile in their own (limited) ways, but this is where they finally adopted a sound that can actually be described as lush and appealing instead of chilling, soulless and distant. The production is crystal clear, Bernard has finally tapped into his own (rather pleasant) singing voice, which is for once actually put at the front of the mix, and almost none of the songs allow their electronic elements to stand front and center and dominate the sound, instead letting the entire band sound like a fully functioning unit. This is apparent right from the start of the album, as "Love Vigilantes" effectively erases any trace of the cold, older New Order with a warm, soothing vocal performance over, of all things, a stuttering harmonica and a thwacking acoustic drum line. Gear! Stylistically, it's still that same mechanized brand of synthesized '80s rock along the lines of "Age Of Consent," so I can't exactly say that it's for everybody, but this is the closest to a fully organic take on the style that they'd managed yet, and it's just lovely.
To my knowledge, none of these eight songs wound up being regarded as total New Order classics, but most of them probably should've been. Nothing really stands out above the crowd, though "The Perfect Kiss," with its channel-shifting intro and smooth, rolling central melody, certainly tries as hard as it can. Other dollops of greatness are all over the place, though, like the intense, six-minute watery guitar pile-up "Sunrise" (which basically maps out the entire musical direction of the Cure's later Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me album, and if you think I'm lying about the Cure ripping on New Order's sound, just take a listen to "In Between Days") and the heavily synthesized "Subculture," which would be made at least twice as good in its clattering single mix but is still catchy as hell in its own right. On "This Time Of Night," the band actually manages to adapt the "Truth"/"We All Stand" formula to the dimensions of a working band and the song incidentally kicks the asses of both of the aforementioned boring things to a far-off country where hamburgers eat people. Finally, though "Elegia" is far from the best instrumental I've ever heard, it hits upon a pretty effectively chilling tone and doesn't stick around for too long, so I won't bitch about it like people usually do about synth instrumentals.
Unless one of the later albums really makes my kneecaps explode with absolute glee (and pus) when I give them their own final listens, this is probably my choice for New Order's best studio album. I have no idea why I wrote "studio album" just then, since this band has a grand total of one live album and I'm pretty sure that their live performances don't exactly tear up the stage in Leeds-like proportions. 'Taint perfect, but pretty much every song is at least good, thus sparing the listener from having to suffer through any overwhelming embarassments, and the large patches of boredom usually so adherent to the identity of a New Order album are strangely absent. For the closest they've come to a smooth-flowing masterpiece, this is probably your best option.
Post your comments / reviews for this album
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
On Low-Life, the band managed to pull off an effectively dramatic shift from cold, empty, synthesized drone-rockers to more band-ready and welcoming material, but it's not nearly as enjoyable the second time around. What I loved about that album was that the songs managed a combination of synthesized textures and a full-band dynamic while still remaining as creamy and effortlessly catchy as possible (think "The Perfect Kiss"), but it just isn't the same on here. It's not that the band changed its style, it's that they kept it and made it more boring. Instead of swirling with colorful synth textures, the songs are dry and dull, with the New Order sound firmly in place but with very few of the little touches that made the tunes on Low-Life so good. That squeaking harmonica from "Love Vigilantes"? That was pretty damn cool. Too bad there's nothing of its caliber on here at all. I'm not saying it's a bad album, but it's definitely a disappointment coming after the last one, retaining almost all of its musical qualities but with only about half of the cool songwriting.
There are still some really big-ass flashes of brilliance, granted - people who deny that "Bizarre Love Triangle" is one of the catchiest songs of the '80s, with lyrics that only relate to a bizarre love triangle if you're some kind of guy who gets his kicks out of deconstructing the lyrics of '80s pop hits, are just lying through their grimy, yellow, plaque-ridden teeth. My parents don't like it because it's "too pop," but my mom likes the Starland Vocal Band and my dad likes Bad Company so I don't know what to say - the way the synths are matched with that repeated Eastern-like hook and capped off by the famous "every time I see you falling" chorus is just seamless and unforgettable. "Paradise" is a neat opener, too, with a full, meaty sound and a lazy vocal performance that slips into a calm, soothing falsetto in the chorus, and "Weirdo," though sort of messily structured (the soaring refrain is sung twice before the second verse is allowed to come in), is still yet another charming straightforward jangle-rocker in the tradition of all of New Order's other straightforward jangle-rockers. They already did the channel-shifting intro trick on the last album, but it sounds even cooler on here so I guess I won't bitch and moan about it.
Everything else has small little peaks like the not-bad-at-all stately, shifty ballad "All Day Long," but otherwise there's not really much of anything to get thrilled about. It was a pretty poor decision to put "Broken Promise" and "Way Of Life" back-to-back on the same album, since stylistically they're pretty much the same song (or at least they take the exact same approach) and the balladry like "As It Is When It Was" and "Every Little Counts" (which sounds sort of like an updated, duller synth-driven version of Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side") just doesn't do anything at all. I like New Order when they're crafting upbeat, catchy dance-pop or at least pleasant, smooth jangly guitar soundscapes for the much more boring generation that came after the Me Generation, but at their most low-key or generic they're just not very fun to listen to at all. This album has its positive qualities, but when it takes a band exactly one album after adopting their signature sound to make it sound totally generic, there's a problem.
Post your comments / reviews for this album
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I think that the existence of a compilation like this proves that New Order, if nothing else, were way too snooty and presumptuous about their own musical talent. Over a decade after everybody else in the music business had already stopped doing it, these boneheads were busy releasing all of their best material in the form of non-album singles. This was perfectly fine with bands like the Beatles and the Who, who actually left a good amount of worthwhile material on their actual albums that rightfully could've been singles of their own, but what New Order had left over after blasting their load was a mish-mash of table scraps that eventually got cobbled together in the form of inconsistent, colorless full-length albums. This double-disc set is a compilation of the twelve singles the band released inbetween the dissipation of Joy Division and the year 1987, and the A-sides collected together are like a Meaty Beaty Big And Bouncy for the synth-pop era, only without an accompanying Tommy to back up the band's reputation as consistent hitmaking pop geniuses.
The first disc of this compilation is amazing, like an '80s Flashback Cafe playlist with all of the Belinda Carlisle filtered out. With twelve songs and seventy-four minutes of music, your initial thought might be "oh great, padded-out dance filler," and the songs do average around six minutes, but it's for the sake of adequately fleshing out some of the best dance singles I've ever heard. Everyone in the friggin' world knows the dreary "Blue Monday" and its famous programmed percussive intro, and rightfully so, but I'm willing to bet that hardly anybody outside of the UK is as familiar with similarly-solid grooves like "Temptation" and "Shellshock" which are, like, the best things ever. "It's never enough, it's never enough until your HEART STOPS BEA-TING!"... oh man, per-fec-tion. Three songs are remixes of material that already made it onto earlier albums, but they're all improved upon - "Bizarre Love Triangle" and "The Perfect Kiss" both sound lengthier and meatier, which is fine by me, while "Subculture" undergoes a complete transformation from a moderately-catchy synthpop number to a clattering, frenzied mish-mash of Barney (Bernard Sumner, not the dinosaur) and a slew of female backing vocalists, topped off with a repeated keyboard hook which wasn't even there before and makes the song like ten times catchier.
Sadly enough, the second disc consists of the B-sides to these singles, and while some bands use singles' B-sides to showcase material that they felt wouldn't fit onto their albums musically, the songs here are clearly leftovers, and particularly rotted and decomposing ones at that. A good deal of the songs are nothing but the accompanying single stripped of its vocals and made longer, as much as they might try to disguise it with different titles that vaguely allude to the song's lyrics like "The Beach" ("Blue Monday") or "Kiss Of Death" ("The Perfect Kiss"). When this isn't the case, the songs are either totally pointless, go-nowhere and generic takes on the good ol' boring New Order style, whether it's the early Ian Curtis-inspired blah ("In A Lonely Place") or their later, solid synthesized-beat-plus-jangle style ("Lonesome Tonight"). "Hurt" has a neat rhythm track, and "1963" is a decent late-period song that somewhat comes close to resembling Depeche Mode at their dark Black Celebration best, but I'm not going to listen to the rest of the songs again in my life now that I've soullessly evaluated their merit for the sake of applying a number rating to a work of art.
I think that the two discs of this compilation are sometimes sold separately, and if that's true, please, please get the first disc by itself. It's damn close to an easy 10 and shows the band growing from their gothy roots ("Ceremony," actually one of the last couple of songs Ian Curtis wrote before his suicide) to their glossy, mid-'80s pitch-perfect contemporary sound ("True Faith," one of the best pop singles ever and don't you try to deny it) while maintaining a maximum level of danceable catchiness throughout. The B-sides are terrible, but over the course of musical history I don't think anybody's ever accused a synth-pop band of being consistent.
Post your comments / reviews for this album
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
For christ's sake, when I downloaded all of this New Order crap from Audiogalaxy while it was still up and running, I didn't think that I'd actually bring myself to review any of it within the next decade, but here I am, three months later, forcing myself to sit through a succession of albums that all have cool little quirks of their own and show the band slightly developing over time but, in the end, all sound exactly the same. God knows I love music, but this is bordering on masochism. Actually, let me clarify something. I love New Order's dance music. They're great at it. It's their other sound that bores the living piss out of me - that "hey, you know what the world needs more of? Lazy jangle-rockers with watery guitar lines and schoolboy-like vocals!!" sound. Barely anybody associates that sound with them because none of those songs were hits, and y'know why? Because they're boring. It's a distinctive sound, but in the end, it's the catchy, bouncy dance-pop songs that're gonna stand the test of time long after the world has moved on and guitars are a thing of the past and we're in a technological, futuristic world where all music is created by computers because that's how things are obviously going to work assuming that society follows its most logical path.
I bitch in such a manner because this album is New Order's return to shiny dance music, given a glossy, sunny edge which is just goddamn awesome. Unfortunately, a good third of the album is the same ol' watery blooby-blooby guitar-driven crap that was so great on "Sunrise" but boring here. "Love Less" is boring. "Guilty Partner" is boring. "Run" is boring. "All The Way" is.... surprisingly decent. The same old formula given a bright-eyed, synth-line-driven treatment, and it's lovely and I love it all the lovey-dovey, lovey-dovey time. Those other three songs though defy description because they're all the exact same freaking song. Remember "Age Of Consent"? I described that song a while ago. Plug that description into the sentences above and use one of those wonderful little sets of linking verbs to make them into complete thoughts and you'll have nice, compact little sentences that describe each and every one of those songs exactly like I would describe them, only it would help to add some negative descriptors too because I seem to remember liking "Age Of Consent," which is definitely not the case where these particular three songs are concerned.
All of the other songs are ass-shaking masterpieces. There's a song called "Mr. Disco" on this album!!! How cool is that? He should hang around with Disco Stu, I'm sure they'd get along, what with Mr. Disco living his fulfilling life as a fantastic New Order song and all. I can't say that I understand "Fine Time," but it's just a totally fucking crazy song, kind of a five-minute Madchester dance-pop suite that coasts along on a solid groove but slams together so many growling, addictive hooks, none of which repeat themselves and all of which are close to the top of the pile of great New Order melodies. This song needs no remixes - it's a remix of itself. "Round & Round" and "Vanishing Point" are awesome too, but there's not really much that can be said to describe them aside from the fact that they're strangely akin to a bizarre brand of musical ice cream that never melts or loses its flavor. Great friggin' songs, and if their like weren't forced to share the same album with such unmistakable chunks of deja-vu New Order boredom like the songs I insulted earlier, the album would probably get a grade more typical of an album that's in my top three for a given band. But I guess that's the band's fault and not mine.
Post your comments / reviews for this album
COMMENTS
I don't understand how the hell you could even get through this whole album to review it. In fact, you must be fucking superman to get through the rest of the band's catalogue.
I have this tape, but I got it free. "FREE" get it? Nobody listens to this shit except faggots. "FAGGOTS"...GET IT? I thought so.
What the fuck is this shit anyway, man? I mean, woman. Is it techno? Is it disco? Who the fuck cares? It sucks Goat balls!!
Fuck! Why did Nick ever let faggots review albums anyway.
oops, He likes Def Leppard...never mind.
let's see... limited vocabulary... ad hominem attack on the reviewer... homophobic tendencies... obvious and vulgur use of "balls"... my god, you listen to KISS, don't you?!
oh, and the album's not bad. "Vanishing Point" is one of my favorite NuOrdr songs. I give it a 6.
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
I think that I should stop trying to make an overriding theory as to what style New Order are good at and just rest on my laurels and admit that they're just not a very good band. Last time around, I complained that the watery guitar-rockers detracted from what could've been a fantastic dance album. So four years later, in 1993, they looked nine years into the future using their magic crystal ball, saw that some guy was going to listen to Technique and complain that there wasn't enough dance music, and decided to go back to their roots and make an entire album of the stuff, updated for what they perceived to be the technological advances of the '90s. Unfortunately, your faithful narrator is of the stubborn type who can never be truly pleased by such an awkward and obvious attempt to win his favor, because this album just in't that good. It's by far the most commercial New Order album ever, filled with streamlined melodies and straightforwardly-catchy beats, which, granted, were already the dominating trait on their earlier albums, but it's even more blatant on here. Plus, strangely enough, on a good deal of these songs, the title is actually sung in the lyrics of the song (though it's always just as part of the lyrics and never the main focus of the chorus - they haven't lost all of their artsiness).
The problem is that most of the songs are just crushingly bland. The early-'90s renovations to the New Order sound tend to sound thin and fake, like the plug-and-play techno-lite beats on "Spooky," "Special" and "Chemical" or the rapping verses on "Times Change." It's yet another example of a band trying to take elements totally alien to their sound but not having the stylistic range as a working musical unit to implement these elements nearly as well as the pioneers of these musical styles, to the point where they might as well have just stuck with what they were good at in the first place. And why not? The single "Regret" is good ol' New Order at their shiny, creamy best, with a totally unoriginal riff filtered so heavily it manages to sound authentic anyway serving as the driving force in a perfect pop melody. "Ruined In A Day" is great too - a breathy ballad in the Brotherhood tradition, only a lot better than the balladry on that slice of inconsistency. The less trendy-sounding dance songs are pretty nice, too, like "World" (or "That's The Price Of Love"), sort of a cop-out of a song structurally but upbeat and exciting anyway. Strangely enough, there's a song called "Young Offender" on the second half of the album, and there's also a song called "Young Offender" on the second half of the Pet Shop Boys release Very from the xact same year - did Neil Tennant and Bernard Sumner have a bet going on or something? Whoever writes the better "Young Offender" gets to leave Electronic? I guess Neil won, though the New Order song certainly isn't bad at all.
The few good tunes aren't enough to save the album, though. "Regret" got some airplay in the States and helped the album go gold, but the accompanying material didn't really do anything to cement the band's reputation as a great dance band or anything, and this ended up being the band's temporary farewell release. The whole album just seems haphazardly thrown-together - it doesn't flow at all, most of the songs have tossed-off one-word titles and the cover even says "A New Order Release" on it like it were churned out of Qwest's Magic Album-Cover Making Machine. It's a pretty catchy album, but hardly an inspired one at all, and they've definitely done a hell of a lot better.
Post your comments / reviews for this album
(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
New Order never officially broke up after Republic, but everyone pretty much assumed that they had anyway, since the bandmembers dispersed and spent their time working on solo projects like further albums from Sumner's Electronic and bassist Peter Hook working with his band Monaco, whose music I have never heard and probably never will because my music purchasing as of recently has been restricted to really important albums like the Beach Boys' 15 Big Ones. I'm really glad that these reviews don't get graded by Nick for grammar, because these rambling run-on sentences seem to be the tool of my trade. To everyone's (or at least my) minor amazement, the band burst out of the shadows upon the passing of the new millennium with a new album and a sound cut straight from the cloth of the Brotherhood era. It's still "dance" music in the sense of people labeling minor techno embellishments as "dance" even though you can't dance to it, but for the first time since that album the emphasis is on the guitars. As I've run into the ground, I'm not very crazy for the guitar-heavy side of New Order's sound, but surprisingly enough, they managed to do something interesting and enjoyable with the formula for the first time in their career - finally!!
I think the thing that separates this album from most of their other albums in my mind is that, with a few exceptions, the music is colorful and complex enough to justify the usual New Order repetition, which itself is thankfully at an all-time low. There are a couple of duffers like the two-song clump of "Slow Jam" and "Rock The Shack," which are just as boring and lumbering as their titles (really, who the hell would want to listen to a song called "Slow Jam"??), but the leadoff single "Crystal" is the kind of song I wish bands would write more often - fantastic female backing vocals, a driving arrangement with kicking drums and well-positioned bursts of guitar-flaring intensity, and on top of all of that, a seven-minute running length which ensures that not only is the melody going to be allowed to develop itself to its fullest, it's going to kick your ass for seven whole minutes. "Someone Like You" is great for the same reason, even if it doesn't rock as hard, opting instead for a flowing, sterile, keyboard-heavy vibe in place of the aforementioned single's pure driving force. The snot-nosed single "60 Miles An Hour" channels the Oasis spirit through the vocal chords of a lead singer who doesn't make me want to throw my microwave at the stereo, and mucho-trashed Smashin' Pun-kins frontman Billy Corgan lends his pipes to the ballad "Turn My Way," but doesn't ruin it or anything since he's mostly used as breathy window-dressing to Barney's usual vocal stylings.
I was surprised that I enjoyed this album so much, but I guess some bands really benefit from an eight-year hiatus and a total shift in the surrounding musical culture. The album is modern without sounding trendy and still totally true to the New Order tradition while luckily tossing away the more boring parts of this tradition. It's not as thoroughly classic as Low-Life or the first disc of Substance, but it's definitely as good of an album as these boys are capable of producing at this point and proof positive that New Order guitar-rock doesn't necessarily have to be as boring as sitting in an apartment writing a New Order review while putting off studying for a physics final during your school's summer sessions. Trust me, it's about seventy-million times more interesting than that.
Post your comments / reviews for this album
Index | Main band/artist reviews page