New Order - "Brotherhood" Melody Maker Review

Melody Maker - BROTHERS GRIM

BROTHERHOOD
Factory

LIKE the trick life played on Orson Welles, a calamitous collision of accident and genius has chucked New Order’s career into reverse, doomed them to the bickering of retro-perspective. For everyone lauding their survival, there's someone resenting it. For every plaudit greeting their supposed pursuit of simple purity, there’s an upbraiding for their assumed lack of concern.

“Brotherhood” can’t escape raising all the familiar questions. Or doesn’t want to. I can't decide. Infuriatingly enigmatic, every song strains between adrenalised instrumental passages of thundering majesty and lyrics of such embarrassing openness that the listener is repeatedly frustrated and forced to impugn motives to their apparent schizophrenia. Is this tension between frailty and fury a callous formula or shivering naked naivety? I can’t decide.

When “Way Of Life” lamely lullabyes across Colourfield terrain, the starbursts of energised guitar jam sound cosmetic, as does "As It Is When It Was” when the same thing happens. But the quartet of songs on the B-side are really moving for all their fabrication. “All Day Long” grafts a brutally bare story of a child murder (metaphorical or literal, it hurts, it works) onto Prokofiev and wacks in a Country & Western guitar solo while “Angel Dust" introduces Ennio Morricone to reggae.

Some say this hide-and-seek with cliches and stolen stuff is a bid to purge New Order of all personality, to manufacture some mystery business, a cold and heartless denial of their heritage. Others detect fear and brave faces being put on to keep the snoopers at bay. Others still think the inane and the sublime in such close proximity must be a bid to drag something spiritual into our mundane existence. It could well be that “Brotherhood" does all three.

For those who seek indications of psychological well-or-ill-being in every note, there are enough silly throwaway endings to suggest New Order are either happy-go-Iucky or incurably cynical. For those who seek similar signs in the lyrics, Bernie Albrecht's still trying to sing his one song about incomprehensible loss and strength through blind rage and he’s either still pained and painfully incapable of keeping a relationship together or he's relaxed in his role of Mr Vulnerable and pouring out the self-pitying couplets like cups of tea.

Just why does “Every Little Counts" begin as an absurd pastiche of “Walk On The Wild Side", Bernie chuckling over “I think you are a pig/You should be in a zoo", then abruptly change into a passage of true sentimental beauty only to disintegrate into the orchestral holocaust of The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life" and end with the needle scratching back across the surface? ls there method in this madness or is the madness just a method?

All and nothing is revealed.

STEVE SUTHERLAND