New Order - "Low-Life" NME Review

NME - DRIVEN SNOW OF THE SOUL

NEW ORDER
Low-life (Factory)

WHO CARES to be pure in this old rock music? Pop flesh bumps and grinds in our faces without respite - and any old piece of meat, whether it be Pete Bums or Pat Benatar, will do. The savage amusement this spectacle affords has grown cold. And now back come New Order, the driven snow of the soul, with a record to close everbody's mouth.

Their titles always reflect cruelly on their content. As 'Movement' was immobile and 'Power,  Corruption And Lies' spotlessly true, so 'Low-life' is celestial: it seems to gaze down from heaven. The sound is all ice and glass and brittle bells. Hook's bass lines don't boom, they hum in an elastic brogue that pumps the heart of the songs. When Albrecht sings it's a sound so human that, in the midst of pop’s throng of digital voices, it seems unearthly.

Just as Joy Division churned on the mark of Curtis’ sepulchral tones, so New Order - with their train of synthesisers and drum tattoos - still talk primarily through Albrecht's painful voice. Phrases are theatrically turned and tormented: he strains for the right pitch and misses over and over. Where Curtis was ancient, Albrecht is almost piteously young. He looks like an imprisoned cherub.

And what is he singing? On 'Sooner Than You Think', on the heels of an introduction of madly surging exhilaration, he sings this: “Hello everyone, it’s nice to be here. I've come so far to see you all, I can see your deep blue eyes, they sleep beneath the open skies".

Such absurdly cheap poetry lines from some softcover 1/6 tome of Cotswold verse, maybe. But they serve their purpose - it‘s just another fibre in the sound (does anyone know all the words to 'Blue Monday'?) Although themes run through these eight pieces - betrayal of trust, dreams turning to ashes, solid 'New Order' stuff - they are no more than faultlines in the music. Only the opening 'Love Vigilantes', a tale of lost soldier returning home, makes up a story: like all war fiction, it's deliberately mundane.

So we return to sound. Any single moment from 'Low-life' is immediately recognisable as New Order. They attempt no special departures. Songs build on the blocks of synth vamps that turn over and over like dice, the singer moves in awkwardly, and great cathedral chords loom up from the background. It's a replay more than a revision. 'Sunrise', which concludes the first side, is the real climax of the record: after the most sombre keyboard moan, the song turns into a raving thrash at one with 'Atrocity Exhibition'; and it stammers to a halt, nowhere to go.

Because, perhaps, N.O. have no particular place to stop in. Having scoured European expressionism and scanned the features of the dancemix, as if in search for some palliative (for the pain!), they are adrift again in a grey land without peaks- a bit off the map. This is the 'low life'. The second side is a magnificently bracing affair, the music a cold flame of urgency in 'Sooner Than You Think' and 'Sub-culture’, but it opens with a crystalline threnody in 'Elegia' - a melody created and played in a perfect vacuum.

In the final 'Face Up', Albrecht actually whoops when he sings 'I cannot bear the thought of you'. And he means it. They want to shut everybody's mouths. There is a last bitter twist. The final words you can hear in the songs are 'we were pure'.

'Low-life' is New Order's ‘Closer‘.

Richard Cook