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CD OF THE WEEK: POP Order restored
By J.D. CONSIDINE Friday, April 8, 2005 Page R33 Special to The Globe and Mail
Waiting for the Sirens' Call New Order London Rating: *** ½
Because so few bands ever manage to create anything of substance after their initial run of success, critics are fond of applying F. Scott Fitzgerald's line about there being "no second act in American lives" to rock-'n'-roll careers. There may be a refusal to leave the stage, but that's not quite the same thing.
New Order, on the other hand, started out as a second act. The Mancunian quartet made its initial splash as Joy Division, a group whose career peaked in 1980 with the release of the magnificently melancholy Love Will Tear Us Apart and the suicide of singer Ian Curtis. Within months, they'd regrouped, and by 1983 New Order neatly defined the dance-rock aesthetic with the cool, cybernetic club hit Blue Monday.
Ten years and a half-dozen albums later, New Order splintered into solo projects, and a sputtering reunion album (1995's Republic) suggested the band had played its final encore. Then there was a surprisingly strong comeback in 2001 with Get Ready, and now, with the unexpected vitality of Waiting for the Sirens' Call, New Order seems on the verge of a successful third act.
Fittingly, this new album draws on the band's most familiar elements -- percolating electronics, clanking guitar, the tart resignation of Bernard Sumner's voice, the thrumming counterpoint of Peter Hook's bass -- but takes them in a new direction, one that has less to do with arch modernism than with old-fashioned rock-'n'-roll passion.
That's not to say New Order has abandoned the dance floor. There's a perky electro-beat feeding into the bass hook driving Krafty, plenty of metronomic thump beneath Guilt Is a Useless Emotion, an impressively funky, Caribbean-inflected groove within I Told You So. But the emphasis is on guitar-driven rock, a move that would be considered getting back to roots were it not for the fact that New Order never exhibited any particular affinity for guitar rock.
Nonetheless, there's no denying the strummy pulse and chiming rhythm guitars that drive Turn, or the power chord accents and pounding tom-toms that power Working Overtime. Interestingly, there also seems to be a conscious attempt within these songs for New Order to establish a new, er, order in its work. Once defiantly modernist and happily allied with the dance club aesthetic, with these songs the band jokes about dance music and even plays off the rock-'n'-roll canon with Who's Joe, a sort of postmodern rewrite of the oldie Hey Joe.
This being New Order, Joe isn't consumed with jealousy so much as suffering from anomie and rejection. But instead of letting our hero flee to Mexico, New Order chases after him: "I'll look for you, and I'll take you home," promises Sumner, lending an unexpected homoerotic twist to the tale. Not the same old rock 'n' roll, but then, neither is it the old New Order, exactly.
But that's as it should be. By twisting its sound into a new shape, New Order may well make a go of its third act. Who knows what they'll manage for an encore.
