Well if you’ve been following along with New Order you won’t be terribly surprised with this one, it’s another solid album by this band, in a similar style to before. If anything the electronic stuff on this album is even more “electronic-y” than ever before, which is immediately clear from the very first track (which is a pretty hot beat iyam). Sometimes this gets pretty extreme with the 80s electronic cheese sound, like just listen to those synths on “Round & Round”, lmao, it’s that ridiculous “fake orchestra hit” sound that you gotta love (or hate). Now let it be known that I skipped a New Order album, Brotherhood (1986) so idk exactly where that falls in the development of their sound, but somehow I think you guys will forgive me for that omission.
Now these guys always sort of included some more natural instrument sounds in contrast to the electronic experiments, and if anything the division is more clear here than ever before – the songs on the album seem to alternate between the more clearly “electronic” tracks and the clearly “natural” sounding tracks with real (sometimes acoustic) guitars, more natural sounding drums and bass, etc. So that keeps things interesting although I find myself preferring the more electronic stuff at this point.
One interesting bit of trivia on this album is that the song “Run” is credited to “New Order/John Denver”, lmao, that’s because John Denver sued them for ripping off his song “Leaving on a Jet Plane” (jd he wrote that). Now in my professional opinion this is officially NOT a ripoff, it’s just one short melodic phrase that is similar, and the chords are different, and it’s a pretty simple phrase anyway. This is definitely a case of John Denver being an overly litigious asshole :down:
Anyway I recently realized that when I was originally compiling this list, I overlooked THE most popular and acclaimed New Order album, which is the singles compilation Substance. Oopsies! Some of you might be relieved to know that I’m perfectly fine just letting that one slide. Anyway New Order continued to make albums every few years after this, in fact they’re still together to this day but I’m gonna say goodbye to them here. Obviously this stuff diverged pretty far from what’s normally considered “punk rock” but I just had to make fully sure I was giving the whole Joy Division phenomenon a fair shake, and I’m glad I did. I ~learned something~
Does Bang want to listen to this? Sure, I guess.
The Davis Collective 