NO Blended...not stirred

A rave review of NO's Retro from the good folks at BLENDER (MAXIM's music mag - who always have phat props for NO/JD)

http://www.blender.com/guide/reviews/index\_608.html

The guy who wrote the article however is obviously a raging idiot though!!!!

Yeah and the link at the bottom suggests to buy Retro from Amazon....

NOT!!!!

can someone post the review here? I'm at work and it says that the page is forbidden, that I'm not authorized to view it.

Here you go :)

New Order
Retro Warner Bros.

The most influential British band since the Sex Pistols craved beats, beauty and experimentation Release date: January 7, 2003

By Andrew Harrison

New Order wrote the most famous dance-rock single of all time by accident — or so they claim — while trying to figure out the alien technology of a new drum machine in 1983. The song, “Blue Monday,” pushed post-punk melancholy onto the dance floor, transforming music as fundamentally as two other watersheds of electronica, “Love to Love You Baby” and “Planet Rock.”

To emphasize the change, New Order released this eight-minute track as a 12-inch single only. It would go on to sell more than 3 million copies, influencing everyone from Moby to Björk, Smashing Pumpkins to Afrika Bambaataa.

“Blue Monday” marked an improbable rebirth for this Manchester group, which began as Joy Division, a beautifully desolate post-punk band that ended when its depressive singer and muse, Ian Curtis, hanged himself. The remaining trio replaced Curtis not with another dark-star frontman but with novice keyboard player Gillian Gilbert, the girlfriend of drummer Stephen Morris. And they kept making perverse decisions. Throughout the ’80s, New Order defied the expectations of their trench-coated audience: From gothic lament to electronic symphony to disco uproar, they reinvented rock on every one of their singles.

Though New Order are already heavily anthologized, Retro, at four CDs, is the most comprehensive. There’s little here for collectors — only two tracks, plus 14 live ones, were previously unreleased — but New Order were always diverse and adventurous rather than prolific.

Disc one presents their best-known compositions in confusing, non-chronological sequence. The New Order story is all about trajectory, from rain-sodden Northern English doomsters to Ecstasy-gobbling rave freaks to born-again, ax-thrashing rock beasts. It makes little sense to kick off halfway through the plot with the Day-Glo house of “Fine Time” (1988), then rewind seven years to 1981’s “Temptation,” a psychologically darker kind of disco.

Still, almost everything on this disc is fantastic: the plangent “Ceremony,” also from 1981, when they were still thinking like Joy Division; the anthemic “Regret,” from 1993; and “Blue Monday.”

The star of disc two is Peter “Hooky” Hook, New Order’s bass player and unreconstructed rock pig. No one plays bass like Hook: Holding it at knee height, he turns it into a growling lead instrument with a strangely expressive sound. These early selections reflect an ascetic New Order, before the debauchery of their 1988 spin into house music. There are polyphonic symphonies (“Your Silent Face,” “Elegia”) and plenty of sprightly dirge-rockers, but the dominant themes are an elusive poignancy (New Order songs have moods, not subjects), and Hook’s genius, elephantine bass noise.

Disc three illustrates that remixes can be, well, mixed. One of the first rock bands to entrust their tapes to DJs, New Order have let quality control slide lately — DJ Lee Coombs’s trance mix of “Crystal,” from 2001, is just boring. But the mid-period material is all verve and creativity. John Robie and Shep Pettibone transfigure “Shellshock” and “Bizarre Love Triangle” in a blast furnace of edits, and unreleased mixes of “Confusion” and “Paradise” certainly more than justify the cost of this box for completists.

The band’s biggest secret is blown on the live disc, on which this supposed studio act rocks out. The sound quality on the early recordings (“Ceremony,” “Procession”) is poor to shocking, but they’re full of tightly wound passion. By the middle of the ’80s, their enormous rock/disco noise was filling stadiums — the epic performance of “The Perfect Kiss” from July 1985 is breathtaking.

Few bands live so many different lives. New Order, however, are typically unimpressed with their achievement. “I fucking hate ‘Blue Monday,’ ” singer Bernard Sumner reveals in Retro’s liner notes. “It’s not really a song. It was an experiment in technology.” True, but as Retro proves, New Order knew lots of ways to experiment with beats and beauty.

Links: New Order official site Buy this album from Amazon.com

January/February 2003