New Order

Certain Songs #1321: New Order – “Slow Jam”

September 15, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Get Ready
Year: 2001

Because Get Ready came out on August 27, 2001, it probably got kinda lost for me. I’d been unemployed since April and spent the first three weeks of September crashing on couches in Los Angeles while working a temp job for the Star Trek website (thanks Tim!) and interviewing at IndyMac Bank for the job that within a couple of months would have Rox & I packing up our Bay Area lives and starting our L.A. lives. All of this, of course, in the wake of the destruction of the twin towers in New York.

And yet, I was still somehow able to crank out a positive review of Get Ready for Neumu, a website started by Michael Goldberg after his pioneering Addicted to Noise site ended. Probably because I had plenty of time to listen to it during my purgatory at the Extended Stay America in Monrovia, the less said about, the better.

Certain Songs #1320: New Order – “Run”

September 14, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Technique
Year: 1989

And then, three long years between Brotherhood and Technique, an uncharacteristic thing for a band that — if you counted Joy Divsion & the singles comps (fair, because they collected non-album songs) — had released 10 albums worth of studio material in their first decade.

Incredibly prolific. Until they weren’t. Which is normally how it happens, I guess. I mean, except for Robert Pollard, of course. The irony is that — because of the success of 1987’s Substance singles comp, as well as their ongoing onslaught of singles — New Order was getting ever more successful even as their music-making was slowing down.

Certain Songs #1319: New Order – “Every Little Counts”

September 13, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brotherhood
Year: 1986

The closing track on Brotherhood was as close to a ballad as New Order was ever going to get, and was also perhaps the silliest, most light-hearted track that they ever did: not only does Bernard Sumner crack himself up during the opening verse — not quite to the level that Bob Dylan did on “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” — because he was very aware of the silliness.

And of course, none of this mattered because “Every Second Counts” was a near-perfect closing track for Brotherhood, one more comedown after the near-psychedelic coda of “Angel Dust,” and also closing the “disco” side of the record with a slow dance song.

Certain Songs #1318: New Order – “All Day Long”

September 12, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brotherhood
Year: 1986

My favorite song on Brotherhood starts off as a drum-machine driven chill pill after the frenzy of “Bizarre Love Triangle” and buries its lyrical darkness in a combination of mumbled lyrics and a very very long instrumental section.

And in fact, it does such a good job hiding that lyrical darkness that I literally had no idea how dark it truly was until I read Peter Hook’s description of it as “the only song about child abuse you can dance to.” And even though I’d been listening to it for 30 years, I had no idea. But it’s all right there:

Certain Songs #1317: New Order – “Broken Promise”

September 11, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Brotherhood
Year: 1986

Despite not quite having the highs of the previous two albums, Brotherhood turned out to be my favorite New Order album, maybe because it took the step of dividing the sides up so that side one was the “rock” side and side two was the “disco” side.

And so while you’d think that my favorite songs would all be on the “rock” side, what made Brotherhood great was that while side one was incredibly consistent, side two had my favorite songs, which we’ll talk about in the next couple of days.

Certain Songs #1316: New Order – “Face Up”

September 10, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Low-Life
Year: 1985

By now, it has probably become obvious that none of my favorite New Order songs post-“Temptation” were actually singles, and so my personal history with this band completely deviates from the masses. Which was not my intention — anybody who has paid attention knows that I generally gravitate towards singles, even with my favorite artists — but New Order was the rare great singles band where I preferred the album cuts to the singles.

What is my intention, however, is to point out that to limit your knowledge of New Order to just the singles isn’t the way to go, not just because you miss out on songs that woulda been singles for a lesser band — your “Age of Consent” or “Love Vigilantes” — but also deeper cuts like “Face-Up,” which ended Low-Life on a real up.

Certain Songs #1315: New Order – “Sunrise”

September 9, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Low-Life
Year: 1985

With Gillian Gilbert setting the scene with a dark dark synth tone, “Sunrise” hinted at a road not taken for New Order: continuing on the hard-rocking path originally blazed by Joy Division.

That, of course, would have been a disaster. They were able to get away with it for “Ceremony” and “Dreams Never End,” but the only way that New Order to be a viable band by 1985 was to do exactly what they did: make their own path by fully embracing the electronics that had always existed at the fringe of Joy Division’s sound.

Certain Songs #1314: New Order – “Love Vigilantes”

September 8, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Low-Life
Year: 1985

If Power, Corruption & Lies showcased a band that had figured out their totally unique sound, the follow-up, 1985’s Low-Life, was the sound of that band alternately celebrating and deconstructing that sound.

So while singles “Sub-Culture” and “The Perfect Kiss” (those fucking bullfrogs) were pretty much what you expected, other songs, like the abstract “Elegia,” the goth “Sunrise” and the opening track, “Love Vigilantes” came from left field.

Certain Songs #1313: New Order – “Your Silent Face”

September 7, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Power, Corruption and Lies
Year: 1983

In just three years, we’d gotten to the point where the most atypical song on any New Order album would be the one that sounded the most like a Joy Division callback — in this case, “Isolation” from Closer — and yet was still a showcase for their progression, both musical and technological.

And so it was with “Your Silent Face,” six minutes of utter bliss that slowly rumbled out of the beginning of side two of Power, Corruption & Lies. The synth wash that Gillian Gilbert plays is so lovely and evocative, I used it for at least one music bed while doing promos for KFSR.

Certain Songs #1312: New Order – “The Village”

September 6, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Power, Corruption and Lies
Year: 1983

Of course, here’s the thing about New Order’s unprecedented fusion of synth-pop and rock: it took me awhile to get on board with the synth-pop side of things. Especially in 1983, when we were being inundated with all kinds of synth-based bands from the other side of the ocean — the second or third or fourth British Invasion — and I felt more of a kinship with all of the homegrown guitar bands that were fighting for radio and MTV airplay.

And, in fact, had New Order not had the pedigree that they had, it’s entirely possible that I would have turned up my nose at them in the same way that I did Duran Duran, ABC, Depeche Mode and a whole flock of others. But they they had that pedigree, which I think so they were able to be either a guitar band for synth-poppers or a synth-pop band for guitar freaks.