Inconvenient truth Mar 06 '08 (Updated Mar 07 '08)
Pros NEW ORDER was born
Cons JOY DIVISION was dead
The Bottom Line The old was not yet dead the new was not yet born - nothing could be remotely more diverse than such a passage than NEW ORDER's 1981 Movement
Full Review Almost nobody seems to like Movement, NEW ORDER's 1981 debut, as it is - a remarkable epitaph to Ian Curtis, the late leader of JOY DIVISION, who committed suicide listening to IGGY POP’s blissful The Idiot and after facing Werner Herzog’s unsettling movie Stroszek.
Some say it's derivative - accordingly, JOY DIVISION's groundbreaking work couldn't be replicated without a key member. Some cringe at Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook trading vocal lines as if they were Curtis impersonators (and managing to do it convincingly, for most of the proceedings). Some dislike the early NEW ORDER keyboards courtesy of Gilliam Gilbert, then just Stephen Morris' girl. Some protest over Martin Hannett's clear-dark production with spiky keyboards alternatively calling Krautrock and Synthpop.
People were not ready to realize JOY DIVISION depended much more on Sumner, Morris, Hook and Hannett than the Rock N'Roll mythologist would like to. As NEW ORDER successfully replicate the JOY DIVISION sonority in an ambiguous fashion - honoring and blaming his former pal, people would remain divided between fascination and unhinged hatred - regarding the same, straightforward, process. If music can convey such an ambiguity, we are closer to what makes humans human. Hannett’s bipolar production is just perfectly suited for the proposal.
As NEW ORDER unveils the next step past Closer, the post-Punk audience was reluctant to accept the news in their own terms. Dynamic, yet melodic, Indie post-Punk with synths. Turgid, crawling post-Punk infused with Blues pathos. People expected the end of the centuries' malaise of Curtis, the dead-end gloomy howl of Decades, the desperate cry of 24 Hours, the unholy celebration of Transmission, the horrifying downward spiral of She's Lost Control.
Instead they got some sensitive, melancholic plea for a former friend, the barely disguised emotional collapse underneath the synthetic proceedings. Trying to replicate Curtis' vocals made NEW ORDER express the differences between their approach and his, without detaching from JOY DIVISION's palette enough for people to "forgive" the remaining bandmembers. The absence of Curtis was eloquent through NEW ORDER's songs – and it affects vocal performances quite a lot - but it eventually doesn’t dominate the sonic proceedings. Nobody seems available for a purging operation. Time to move on.
Dreams Never End is a compulsively listening item, a cornerstone of early-1980s music - the threshold that bridges post-Punk to Indie aesthetics. This time synths were put aside. An intro full of Art Rock grandeur – as if colliding guitar and bass would explode – coalesce around a quicksand Indie rhythm and then finds a New Wave flanger. NEW ORDER songs are lead by bubbling Hook’s bass lines and that’s a brave step beyond JOY DIVISION displayed first-hand here. One of the striking features of Movement – the disjunction of vocals and sonority as a hint of emotional instability and difficulty to communicate/articulate sudden death – is also shown here in its boldest. Sumner’s murky voice borrows a Darth Vader vocoder that fairly contrasts with the lilting riffs. Scars open wide. It seems THE CURE lifted the most remarkable guitar figure for their hit and classic In Between Days – Peter Hook still maintains such a claim.
NEW ORDER wanted nothing but the Truth. And the truth was Ian Curtis didn’t know what to do of his tormented life. He left behind a breeding wife and a recalcitrant lover. He left behind a band on the brink of (cult) stardom. So the remainder carried on with their lives but didn’t ignore the grief and gloom endowing facts that were largely left unspoken. Thus the grandiose, tortured Eastern synths of Truth, an otherwise perverse brand of Electro-Funk. Like a spooky, relentless electric funeral, it merges the late-day JOY DIVISION obsession with hermetic minimalists KRAFTWERK and the muted survivors of the Curtis tragedy exhibiting their own day-to-day atrocity. That is, the truth means surviving and coping with emotional scars – not all of them articulated through spoken language. The waves of synths were never to die in the bass-guitar beach according to Gilbert and Hook – the atonal noise from Sumner more than hinting at the Disorder-Exhibition, his detached voice lost in the inner wilderness. So the track gets down a profane oceanic mood Sigmund Freud would cry next to.
Senses is a much more percussive item (human, Morris’ percussion) with conventional Goth guitar lines and buried bass, as if altered senses conveyed NEW ORDER’s. A loose synthetic Funk jam (?) occupies the middle section of this sloppy song, not conventional enough for purists not innovative enough to resist diminishing in CAN and THE CURE’s shadow. Of course NEW ORDER was on par with such heavyweights – simply not here. There’s a minor delight in listening to Sumner and Hook trading melodic lines in the dark – but we know they would go on to greater heights, lows and plateaus. I still love the Morris pattern and when Gilbert arrives unfettered, it is a remarkable show of her abilities.
Chosen Time is haunting and brisk – a Synthpop sleeper some years before the form was popularized by British bands bridging to America. Crisp and gentle, with a calm, yet vocoded, Sumner vocal, it predates NEW ORDER in their abstract humanity, noticeable limbs, arms and faces behind the gradual fading to black. Clocking at just 3:23 it could still be a hit in someone else’s hands. Hook’s bass is shown it its uncanny ability to get under the guitar and synths’ skin. Sumner acquiesces before the inevitable tragedy in which Curtis canvassed his Rock N’Roll days and finds a suitable future in the emotional limbo – that mirrors the disconnection of millions of individuals in late-day Modernity. Atari sound effects, charming by today’s standards, are featured in the coda.
ICB – Ian Curtis Buried – seemed to much for JOY DIVISION fans circa 1981. To mourn a friend with an elegiac, love-like letter was OK, according to Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sid Vicious and the Rock martyrdom pantheon. But NEW ORDER was nearly vengeful and impious in their “tribute” to Curtis. Walking all over his dead body in a general sense is what Movement is about – rambling on JOY DIVISION’s legacy, repudiating it, finding dwelling strength in the collapsing emotions, individuation behind the ashes of their informal leader and spokesmodel.
The Goth number ICB is a microcosm of such trends. There’s a spiky JOY DIVISION bass-guitar-drum pattern followed by a hollow synth figure as the instruments start crawling at the cemetery gates. The experience is largely vicarious – as much as Sumner’s voice roaming around Curtis. Then the whole thing ignites to a netherworld of skewed VELVET UNDERGROUND cloudy oblivion – as if each instrument was responsible for some bodily function of Curtis…Until the sinister main riff put the remains, as a sonic Frankenstein, in their “own” places. A theatrical, affecting performance – without a single tear falling from the perpetrators.
The Him presents NEW ORDER ironically investing Curtis on the role of a monumental martyr – a religious Rock N’Roll figure. Apart from Sumner’s detached mourning and mocking of Curtis we have the band recasting THE CULT’s larger-than-life neon riffs in keyboards. Of course THE CULT was not available back in 1981, there was Southern Death Cult which NEW ORDER may or may not have met during the underground days of British post-Punk. But it’s cool to figure out how their proposal would fit in NEW ORDER’s then sketchy palette. With Gilbert onboard those feminists in disguise turn Billy Duffy’s rough and ready approach in a subtler thing that is almost funny – a misfit marionette of a Synthpop song.
Doubts Even Here, quite simply, is NEW ORDER’s pinnacle and the last section of their JOY DIVISION umbilical noose. Hook gets the mic and Gilbert provides haunting, skewed backing vocals. Hook sounds remarkably like Curtis, even though in condemnatory fashion, far removed from that transcendental acquiescence of Atmosphere or the tortured Byronic deliriums that comprise much of Closer. Through a dense interpretation of Curtis’ fading love affair with a Belgian groupie, NEW ORDER conveys the incommunicability of individuals, the senseless folding of sensibility, the folly of words, the distance betweens friends and lovers alike.
Love may tears us apart – but space gets the upper hand next to friction. People can’t share their own intimacy even though they can articulate bodies and words. Collapsing without warning, NEW ORDER was doubtful of loving. In their eyes, proceeding to take a lifetime to oblivion, the idea that their friend and informal leader died an Existentialist, a Pop Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. Nihilism takes precedence over the sweaty, organic ritual of love-making, love-dismantling and love-lessness. If NEW ORDER agreed with Curtis they would have committed artistic suicide during their own debut.
As they manage to surpass nihilism with human doubt, even here at the fringes of hollow inner hell, they find some considerable human safe haven in piety. This time you see tears in their eyes as they ponder on Curtis’ earnest folly. Next to his fatal indifference, NEW ORDER conveys a striking difference, between man and woman, whose noise conclusion points to the persistence of doubt and further attempts of connection and belonging. Another difference between sense and sensibility points to the open-ended outcome of Doubts Even Here – an amorphous cacophony of possibilities after mourning Curtis’ epic dead-end. Last but not least, NEW ORDER was more doubtful of Curtis than of love itself. Therefore they survived the test.
Any attempt to top Doubts Even Here would be fairly futile and NEW ORDER decided to embrace the lasting ambiguity for the final statement, Denial. Which denial? Denial of forgiveness to Curtis? Denial of Curtis’ explanations to his friends? Denial of Rock N’Roll immortality for JOY DIVISION survivors? Denial of their (belated) commercial success in the guise of the epic, but not popular enough, suicide of their friend? We will never know.
Against the backdrop of major decaying depression items as Decades, Denial fleshes its humble muscles with penetrating percussion from Morris sending shivers down Gilbert’s icy synths. Another young mix of confusion, confession and confidence from even fresher Sumner is only surpassed by monumental Hook, sprinkling shady roses in the dark. This band was a tremendous lineup (nothing personal, Phil Cunningham is no match to Gilbert). Galloping Sumner riffs on the back of Eastern synthetic drones can’t be stopped. If only they didn’t ring for eternity…They would still be roaming around Curtis. VELVET UNDERGROUND once again provides the framework for the resulting abrasive outcome, a ritualized jam session of caffeine addicts. The strangled final riffing unleashes our consciousness in what regards this personnel being associated with DAVID BOWIE – they started as “Warsawa”. Like a cat from Japan, Gilbert purrs and moans through her primitive, endearing synth. I bet Curtis would never get there in the end. There is a strong sense in Denial being the “otherness” that lies beyond sense and sensibility. The difference between NEW ORDER and JOY DIVISION becomes unbridgeable – if only because JOY DIVISION members crosses the threshold during this remarkable Movement album and never looked back, except to pi$$ its silent face off.
Before the flood I highly recommend blksqul’s blissful, moving review which years ago made me think of reviewing Movement someday. Time has arrived. See ya!
good album.
