Power, Corruption & Lies - New Order
Posted: Thu May 19, 2005 1:38 amAh, a beautiful painting of flowers in a basket. The brush strokes both strong and fragile, making the still life look real and painterly at the same time. How can you feel anything but light-hearted when taking in such a view?
Well, New Order took in the view. And they saw a subtext of rot, of elitism and moneyed pleasures. They stopped to smell the roses, and the perfume reminded them of "Power, Corruption and Lies." The original vinyl pressing went a step further at denying warmth. Peter Saville's design for Factory Records included a spectrum at the top right corner, which, when decoded, spelled out FACT75 -- just another manufactured product. The band name and album title could only be divined by consulting a color wheel on the back of the album, and matching color to letter on the inside sleeve.
Now, before you write off New Order as sad sacks and miserablists, realize there is humor at work here, and also a distance born of self-preservation. New Order, after all, had two missions. The first, to distance themselves from the spectacular fallout of Joy Division. The second, to forge their own identity. On this album, they come close to achieving both.
A small bit of history. New Order came to being after Ian Curtis hanged himself. Curtis fronted Joy Division, a post-punk monolith which used a palette playing moments of found beauty against nearly bottomless dread to evoke the oppressive, factory-town ambience of Manchester in the '70s. After Curtis' suicide, the remaining members -- Bernard Sumner, guitar; Peter Hook, bass; Stephen Morris, drums -- took a breather, then reformed, with Morris' girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on keyboards, as New Order. Sumner assumed vocal duties. The band's first album, 1981's Movement, was considered by many an aping of Joy Division's style, so the band fought back with a few then-state-of-the-art computerized singles (including "Everything's Gone Green"), and prepped the record-buying public for this follow-up album in 1983.
Of course, none of this would matter if it weren't for a certain single that came out after this album hit -- "Blue Monday," the best-selling 12-inch of all time. Consequently, you've heard it, probably ad nauseum, and wouldn't get anything new out of it from my review. A perfectly structured indie dance classic, backed by an enigmatic and haunted lyric ("I see a ship in the harbor/I can and shall obey/But if it wasn't for your misfortune/I'd be a heavenly person today"). The U.S. version of "Power, Corruption and Lies" includes that song and the remixed, echoey B-side version, "The Beach." The success of this song would fuel New Order to greater heights, and greater flameouts (including the collapse of their partly owned Hacienda club) than anyone would expect. But that was far in the future.
"Age of Consent," aside from Gilbert's synth line and Sumner's wavery vocal, could easily pass as a more light-hearted Joy Division moment. Morris' crisp timekeeping, Hook's ability to play bass as though it were a lead instrument, and Sumner's guitar scorch point easily in the direction of their former band. But the lyrics also contain a lack of pretension that Curtis was hardly able to stay away from, giving the song a human, accessible touch. "I'm not the kind that likes to tell you/Just what I want to do/I'm not the kind that likes to tell yooou .... Ooo!" Score one for New Order.
"We All Stand" shows that New Order were still trying to find their identity. It sounds like nothing so much as slowed-down Police. It has a strange, clicky bounce that doesn't jibe well with the hesitant lyrics of "Three miles to go/At the end of the road/There's a soldier waiting for me," and is even less appropriate for the climax -- "There's blood on shore!" It does show a side of New Order we'll never see again, so for that, it has value.
Ah, here we go. "The Village" marries some burbling synth to some Joy Division instrumentation. And while a slight song in the New Order canon, it is an important developmental step. A love song (from the same members that brought you "Love Will Tear Us Apart") with lyrics so embarrassingly naive and natural, you know it must be true. "Oh, our love is like the flowers/The rain, the sea and the hours." Awww. Barney's in love. So are the rest of the band, apparently, because this one lifts off.
"5 8 6" is next, and it's one I skip. The band is making huge strides from song to song, finding their voice more and more -- but frankly, I'm glad they didn't use gormless jams as studio fodder after this. Yes, it must have been painstaking trying to loop the vocals over themselves using the technology of 1983. They probably had to use tape and scissors. But it doesn't make the song any better. It goes on for 7 minutes, and at the point where it should climax -- 5 minutes in -- it just keeps going and going, ruining its own conclusion. Kinda like that movie A.I.
The best song on the album is next. Yes, even better than the iconic, appended on "Blue Monday." It's called "Your Silent Face," and, years later, it still makes me tear up for its power. Marrying a ghostly, rhythmic synth; firmly rooted bass; perfectly placed guitar; and mechanical drum snaps; the song is, I think, a memoriam of Ian Curtis -- as well as a calling down of his legend.
You see, people get the wrong idea about tragic frontmen. Many actually believe that Curtis died for his music, that he killed himself for his art. No, idiots. He killed himself because his epilepsy was worsening, because an extramarital affair was spiraling out of control, and because he was a self-sabotager at every turn. He was distant and aloof with his band, chronically depressed, mentally ill. Can you imagine a bigger slap in the face, young and energetic, in a band you believe in that's actually breaking big, knowing you're about to tour the U.S., only to find that your frontman, the cipher that the band's imagery hangs from, your uneasy friend, has hanged himself?
"A thought that never changes remains a stupid lie/It's never been quite the same/No hearing or breathing, no movement, no color/Just silence." There's no romanticizing here. A self-destructive path is not something to take notes on, but a "stupid lie." Sumner continues.
"Rise and fall of shame/A search that shall remain/We asked you what you'd seen/You said you didn't care." This paints quite a different picture of Curtis than a tragic antihero. He was distant, and selfish. They ask to be brought into Curtis' pain, ("We asked you what you'd seen"), and Curtis shrugs.
Following further lashing out, the most important moment comes at the end of the song. "You've caught me at a bad time/So why don't you p*ss off?" It's a denial of the Joy Division legacy, which not only focused on bad times, but based its whole career around them. Sumner isn't trying to be poetic here -- he's genuinely angry, and he's not going to hide it with florid shields. The music that blooms out of his final kiss-off swells, triumphant. We've made our peace, this music says. It's time to move on.
Into "Ultraviolence," which is a misstep only a band on its second album could make. Having just denied Joy Division its power to control New Order's future, the band does its best on this track to evoke the past. In fact, this sounds so much like Joy Division that its limitations are immediately revealed. Powerful, primal -- but Sumner simply can't cut it with his watery, out-of-tune vocal. There's no way he'll ever have the gravitas, the baritone dread, of Curtis. New Order would never try for something this dark and tribal in tone again, and it's to our benefit. (get the "Heart and Soul" boxset if you want true ultraviolence)
"Ecstasy" is mostly an instrumental, with occasional Vocoder pronouncements like "I have lost my way." It points to New Order's future direction as indie dance legends, but it's obvious here that that legend status isn't going to be conferred yet. It's another track, along the lines of "5 8 6," that overstays its welcome.
We close with "Leave Me Alone," which is another reason -- along with "Age of Consent," "The Village" and "Your Silent Face" -- to own this album. Rather than riding the momentum of the dance pulse from the previous track, this one is all scattered guitar and sad pronouncements full of that curious self-sufficient power that marks Sumner's writing. "On a thousand islands in the sea/I see a thousand people just like me/A hundred unions in the snow/I watch them walking, falling in a row." And, of course, "You get these words wrong every time/You get these words wrong -- I just smile."
New Order has a way with grinning at bad news, where Joy Division would become subsumed by it. The difference between Joy Division and New Order is not night and day, but rather night and early evening. You can make out some shapes in the falling light, smell the flowers ready to close up, watch the first points of stars pricking the sky. New Order's power is in dancing past the factory blocks that Joy Division couldn't move away from, turning the music up, living in texture and sound. See them starting to crystallize here. They don't break easy.
WOW...that was long was it?
Well, New Order took in the view. And they saw a subtext of rot, of elitism and moneyed pleasures. They stopped to smell the roses, and the perfume reminded them of "Power, Corruption and Lies." The original vinyl pressing went a step further at denying warmth. Peter Saville's design for Factory Records included a spectrum at the top right corner, which, when decoded, spelled out FACT75 -- just another manufactured product. The band name and album title could only be divined by consulting a color wheel on the back of the album, and matching color to letter on the inside sleeve.
Now, before you write off New Order as sad sacks and miserablists, realize there is humor at work here, and also a distance born of self-preservation. New Order, after all, had two missions. The first, to distance themselves from the spectacular fallout of Joy Division. The second, to forge their own identity. On this album, they come close to achieving both.
A small bit of history. New Order came to being after Ian Curtis hanged himself. Curtis fronted Joy Division, a post-punk monolith which used a palette playing moments of found beauty against nearly bottomless dread to evoke the oppressive, factory-town ambience of Manchester in the '70s. After Curtis' suicide, the remaining members -- Bernard Sumner, guitar; Peter Hook, bass; Stephen Morris, drums -- took a breather, then reformed, with Morris' girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on keyboards, as New Order. Sumner assumed vocal duties. The band's first album, 1981's Movement, was considered by many an aping of Joy Division's style, so the band fought back with a few then-state-of-the-art computerized singles (including "Everything's Gone Green"), and prepped the record-buying public for this follow-up album in 1983.
Of course, none of this would matter if it weren't for a certain single that came out after this album hit -- "Blue Monday," the best-selling 12-inch of all time. Consequently, you've heard it, probably ad nauseum, and wouldn't get anything new out of it from my review. A perfectly structured indie dance classic, backed by an enigmatic and haunted lyric ("I see a ship in the harbor/I can and shall obey/But if it wasn't for your misfortune/I'd be a heavenly person today"). The U.S. version of "Power, Corruption and Lies" includes that song and the remixed, echoey B-side version, "The Beach." The success of this song would fuel New Order to greater heights, and greater flameouts (including the collapse of their partly owned Hacienda club) than anyone would expect. But that was far in the future.
"Age of Consent," aside from Gilbert's synth line and Sumner's wavery vocal, could easily pass as a more light-hearted Joy Division moment. Morris' crisp timekeeping, Hook's ability to play bass as though it were a lead instrument, and Sumner's guitar scorch point easily in the direction of their former band. But the lyrics also contain a lack of pretension that Curtis was hardly able to stay away from, giving the song a human, accessible touch. "I'm not the kind that likes to tell you/Just what I want to do/I'm not the kind that likes to tell yooou .... Ooo!" Score one for New Order.
"We All Stand" shows that New Order were still trying to find their identity. It sounds like nothing so much as slowed-down Police. It has a strange, clicky bounce that doesn't jibe well with the hesitant lyrics of "Three miles to go/At the end of the road/There's a soldier waiting for me," and is even less appropriate for the climax -- "There's blood on shore!" It does show a side of New Order we'll never see again, so for that, it has value.
Ah, here we go. "The Village" marries some burbling synth to some Joy Division instrumentation. And while a slight song in the New Order canon, it is an important developmental step. A love song (from the same members that brought you "Love Will Tear Us Apart") with lyrics so embarrassingly naive and natural, you know it must be true. "Oh, our love is like the flowers/The rain, the sea and the hours." Awww. Barney's in love. So are the rest of the band, apparently, because this one lifts off.
"5 8 6" is next, and it's one I skip. The band is making huge strides from song to song, finding their voice more and more -- but frankly, I'm glad they didn't use gormless jams as studio fodder after this. Yes, it must have been painstaking trying to loop the vocals over themselves using the technology of 1983. They probably had to use tape and scissors. But it doesn't make the song any better. It goes on for 7 minutes, and at the point where it should climax -- 5 minutes in -- it just keeps going and going, ruining its own conclusion. Kinda like that movie A.I.
The best song on the album is next. Yes, even better than the iconic, appended on "Blue Monday." It's called "Your Silent Face," and, years later, it still makes me tear up for its power. Marrying a ghostly, rhythmic synth; firmly rooted bass; perfectly placed guitar; and mechanical drum snaps; the song is, I think, a memoriam of Ian Curtis -- as well as a calling down of his legend.
You see, people get the wrong idea about tragic frontmen. Many actually believe that Curtis died for his music, that he killed himself for his art. No, idiots. He killed himself because his epilepsy was worsening, because an extramarital affair was spiraling out of control, and because he was a self-sabotager at every turn. He was distant and aloof with his band, chronically depressed, mentally ill. Can you imagine a bigger slap in the face, young and energetic, in a band you believe in that's actually breaking big, knowing you're about to tour the U.S., only to find that your frontman, the cipher that the band's imagery hangs from, your uneasy friend, has hanged himself?
"A thought that never changes remains a stupid lie/It's never been quite the same/No hearing or breathing, no movement, no color/Just silence." There's no romanticizing here. A self-destructive path is not something to take notes on, but a "stupid lie." Sumner continues.
"Rise and fall of shame/A search that shall remain/We asked you what you'd seen/You said you didn't care." This paints quite a different picture of Curtis than a tragic antihero. He was distant, and selfish. They ask to be brought into Curtis' pain, ("We asked you what you'd seen"), and Curtis shrugs.
Following further lashing out, the most important moment comes at the end of the song. "You've caught me at a bad time/So why don't you p*ss off?" It's a denial of the Joy Division legacy, which not only focused on bad times, but based its whole career around them. Sumner isn't trying to be poetic here -- he's genuinely angry, and he's not going to hide it with florid shields. The music that blooms out of his final kiss-off swells, triumphant. We've made our peace, this music says. It's time to move on.
Into "Ultraviolence," which is a misstep only a band on its second album could make. Having just denied Joy Division its power to control New Order's future, the band does its best on this track to evoke the past. In fact, this sounds so much like Joy Division that its limitations are immediately revealed. Powerful, primal -- but Sumner simply can't cut it with his watery, out-of-tune vocal. There's no way he'll ever have the gravitas, the baritone dread, of Curtis. New Order would never try for something this dark and tribal in tone again, and it's to our benefit. (get the "Heart and Soul" boxset if you want true ultraviolence)
"Ecstasy" is mostly an instrumental, with occasional Vocoder pronouncements like "I have lost my way." It points to New Order's future direction as indie dance legends, but it's obvious here that that legend status isn't going to be conferred yet. It's another track, along the lines of "5 8 6," that overstays its welcome.
We close with "Leave Me Alone," which is another reason -- along with "Age of Consent," "The Village" and "Your Silent Face" -- to own this album. Rather than riding the momentum of the dance pulse from the previous track, this one is all scattered guitar and sad pronouncements full of that curious self-sufficient power that marks Sumner's writing. "On a thousand islands in the sea/I see a thousand people just like me/A hundred unions in the snow/I watch them walking, falling in a row." And, of course, "You get these words wrong every time/You get these words wrong -- I just smile."
New Order has a way with grinning at bad news, where Joy Division would become subsumed by it. The difference between Joy Division and New Order is not night and day, but rather night and early evening. You can make out some shapes in the falling light, smell the flowers ready to close up, watch the first points of stars pricking the sky. New Order's power is in dancing past the factory blocks that Joy Division couldn't move away from, turning the music up, living in texture and sound. See them starting to crystallize here. They don't break easy.
WOW...that was long was it?