New Order

In May 1980, Ian Curtis took his own life, tragically ending the story of Joy Division, the Manchester band that in England stands as the symbol of post-punk and dark-wave. Renaming themselves New Order, the survivors, still in shock, made guitarist (and chief electronic experimenter) Bernard Sumner their singer and brought in keyboardist Gillian Gilbert. It was only with this second album, however, that they managed to step out of the shadow of their previous band, finding not just a voice of their own but also leaving a deep mark on the course of pop music as a whole.

The turning point came with a track, "Blue Monday", released as a single the same year as this album, of which it stands as the ideal companion piece. The link between the two is the LP's fourth track, "586", almost an original demo of "Blue Monday", a kind of record of the famous song's genesis. Live, the band was known to alternate their own playing with moments in which the musicians would vanish from the stage, leaving the "machines" (synthesizers, sequencers, drum machines) to run through pre-programmed tracks, much to the bafflement of the audience. One of these tracks was a long, molten piece titled "5-8-6", built from an epic bassline, atmospheric synthesizer touches and the layered rhythms of a relentless drum machine: out of it "Blue Monday" would take shape, one of the first electronic tracks to achieve massive mainstream success and a true cornerstone of dancefloors for the following twenty years, the forerunner of the synth-pop that would sweep the Eighties as well as of future electro.

It's a turning point for the band, and it also captures a social shift underway in Manchester, which over the course of the decade would evolve from a grey industrial city into a modern epicentre of nightlife. "We were deliberately making music you could dance to," Sumner would later say, "even though we never went dancing ourselves. When we were in Joy Division, people didn't go to clubs to dance, they went to headbutt each other."

The whole of "Power, Corruption and Lies" moves along the same lines as that track; even the cover art, which pairs a nineteenth-century still life (a bunch of flowers) with a colour combination built on a code (where colours stand for letters, spelling out the title and credits), points to the binary codes of computing and to the relationship between the organic (the flowers, the live-played music) and the digital.

The great inspiration behind this approach can only be Kraftwerk, pioneers in applying "highbrow" electronics to successful pop music; but where the Germans were teutonically rigorous, measured and monumental, New Order were instinctive, brutal and physical, even in their approach to the abstraction of electronics: that's the great innovation of this record. The result is a visceral fusion of man and machine, evident above all in the interchangeability between Stephen Morris's live drums and the drum machines on hypnotic synth-pop pieces like "586", "Ultraviolence", and the lighter "The Village". The latter also betrays a clear fascination with New York disco, a sensual, playful counterweight to Germanic austerity, yet one able to coexist with it within the very same songs.

Another defining element of these tracks, as of the single mentioned above, is Peter Hook's bass: dark, powerful, melodic, pitched as high as a guitar, a genuine link back to Joy Division. One example of its power comes in the dark bursts of "Ecstasy", a track with a prophetic title, given that a further ingredient in the record's overall mood is the euphoria induced by acid, with MDMA still to come. Finally, there's Sumner's plaintive vocal, now free of Curtis's shadow and able to shape a melancholic, resentful poetics of his own, one that merges with the electronic, danceable rhythms in a unique union, exorcising the pain of the past out on the dancefloor.

But New Order were, above all, becoming a great pop group, and proof of that lies in the trio of songs that make this record so memorable. "Age of Consent" is the archetype of pop New Order, a long ride driven by Hook's melodic bass, over which luminous walls of keyboards rise, Sumner's romantic, fatalistic delivery, and a chiming guitar that grows ever more frantic until the paroxysm of the final coda. Like so many of the band's great songs, it's a track with real breadth, growing freely (clearly born out of a jam session) in an instinctive way and only running its course once there's nothing left to add to the sonic picture — a true reflection of the band's self-sufficient, fiercely self-referential philosophy. The album's title itself, taken from a line ("Power, corruption, lies") that the artist Gerhard Richter wrote on the walls of the Kunsthalle in Cologne in 1981, mirrors that same iconoclastic spirit.

"Your Silent Face", on the other hand, is a simply majestic ballad, a descendant of Joy Division's "Atmosphere", at once their most electronic and most romantic song. Here the band's minimalism, evident in the typically simple bass and guitar riffs, is transcended through sheer accumulation into a grandiloquent orchestral crescendo that would go on to heavily influence the Cure's "Disintegration". Bret Easton Ellis would cite the song in his novel "The Rules of Attraction", holding it up as the paradigm of a certain strain of Eighties musical melancholy.

Closing things out is "Leave Me Alone", where the machines disappear and everything starts again as if from zero, with a stripped-down dialogue between guitar, drums and bass that reaches where words cannot, an elegy for swollen hearts and desolate eyes: if forgetting the pain is impossible, this music shows how life can go on regardless. The alternation between machines and humans also embodies an uncertainty between a mechanical, stoic, thoughtless way of moving forward and, conversely, the need to simply let feelings flow.

The organic approach that fuses rock physicality with modern electronic sounds would go on to make New Order, and the whole Manchester scene, great, foreshadowing the explosion of house music and rave parties between the late Eighties and early Nineties. Various strands of electronic music would be influenced by it, the truest heirs to new wave experimentalism, whatever the countless Joy Division clones peddled by 2000s rock might claim. This record, however, remains unique for representing a great transition, both musical and existential, a mysterious threshold between light and dark that still manages to captivate.

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17/04/2008