A grizzled looking bloke on a train in London Live4ever met a few years back proclaimed solemnly in his thick Manc accent: “There are no bad New Order albums mate. Just the last one.”
Up until 2005’s ‘Waiting For The Sirens Call‘, he had a point.
This is after all a band who have at various points in their existence pioneered British synth pop, created the only palatable song about football ever made and re-purposed acid house with a melancholy Northern sense of loss; a national treasure then, albeit a reluctant one.
With that established it’s possible – fair even – to allow them a solitary dud amongst a back catalogue most outfits would give their souls for, a failure which ‘Waiting…’ undoubtedly was.
There was mitigation of course, mostly spinning out of Hook-Sumner inter-personal spats gradually mounting to Superfly TNT proportions, but whatever the intermezzo and by New Order standards, there was little from ‘Music Complete‘s predecessor worth salvaging.
Given the decade which has elapsed between the two, the story here could quite easily have been the band themselves: about how Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook swapped literary blows in their respective autobiographies, how Gillian Gilbert has returned after winning her fight against breast cancer, how surprised they were to find out that they’d split up by dint of Hook’s unilateral departure – or in fact any one of half a dozen other fracas, disputes, ‘torts and so on.
It isn’t though. Instead of saluting the fact that thirty-five years after they formed as a result of Ian Curtis‘ tragic suicide the highly dysfunctional New Order have managed simply to make their tenth album, the headline is that ‘Music Complete’ is not just worthy and erudite, but that it also marks a complete rebirth.
It’s easier to talk about the songs by way of giving you an explanation. Opener ‘Restless‘ could admittedly have come from the same sessions from which spawned ‘Get Ready‘ – orthodox rumbling bass, Sumner’s lilting drawl and Stephen Morris‘ trademark, pummel-then-caress drums – but after that there’s a mutual commitment to not so much push the envelope as set it on fire. Sumner has spoken openly of recording a ‘dance’ influenced record, a newly rediscovered passion driven by listening to groups like Factory Floor and one which will inevitably lead to comparisons with 1988’s ‘Technique‘, the hedonistic salute to the Balearic Islands which remains for many a cherished apex.
Nothing moves in such a ridiculously linear fashion of course, but there are more than echoes of that era to be sure, as the distorted intro to ‘Singularity‘ and the keening synth lines that replace it are as pristine as they’re contemporary, whilst ‘Plastic‘ once again finds Gilbert layering sleek techno intertwined – not supplicant – to Chapman’s bass.
As in your face as this band have ever been, full of energy and understated panache, nothing will quite prepare die-hard fans for what happens next. ‘Tutti Frutti‘ opens in high camp, Italo House style before in a never heard previously departure going full throttle into Chic territory (vocals of course aside), in the process recapturing the absolutely diaphanous pop sensibility of the group’s best side project Electronic at its early peak.
It almost goes without saying that the collective’s no-Hook prerogative is being flouted to its max; ‘People On The High Line‘ thumps with a limb-wrecking Cantina piano heft, whilst ‘The Game‘ tics nervously around a hybrid programming/people axis.
In keeping with this new tradition of experimentation, not everything works. ‘Stray Dog‘ for instance finds Iggy Pop growling unconvincingly, his skills as a raconteur inferior to that as a reformed hell-raiser. Equally, amidst the comets of invention elsewhere, the album’s final chapter ‘Superheated‘ – complete with a handful Sumner’s occasionally trite lyrics – is by comparison something of an ambiguous washout.
It’s probably inappropriate, but let’s go back to Peter Hook now for a final thought on chemistry. When this writer spoke to him in 2012 about the experience of recording ‘Technique’ he was typically honest: “There was quite a lot of tension in the band when we made Technique. It was a weird contradiction not liking each other but at the same time making a great album, but Tony Wilson said to us afterwards that artists have to hate each other to make great music.”
Bold, creative and without doubt a tour-de-force, as ‘Music Complete’ however proves, even visionaries like Wilson himself are sometimes wrong.
What’s more, from now on it’s possible that once more the best New Order album could be the next one.
