1993 05 New Order "Republic" Q Review

ANIMAL

New Order: impenetrable darkness, enveloping gloom and clinging blackness.

NEW ORDER
Republic

If The Smiths were the best British group of the 1980s, then fellow Mancunian miseryguts New Order were the most important. Their restless welding of successive waves of dance music and new technologies to Barney Sumner’s ever-improving singing and ever more personal lyrics continually redefined the edges of indigenous rock and pop. Many more commercially successful groups, Pet Shop Boys and The Cure among them, owed a debt to the sometimes meandering, always understated New Order.

The band’s last studio album, 1989's truly great Technique, a seamless meshing of synthesized rock grooves, traditional instrumentation and Sumner's plaintive lyrics, was largely hatched on Ecstasy island, Ibiza, and, along with The Stone Roses' debut, it remains the artistic peak of that whole UK acid/E/Madchester thing. Everything New Order have done since (the Electronic, Revenge and Other Two solo/ duo projects, the football Number 1, World In Motion, and the general laying about) have seemed like excuses to put off the moment of having to make the follow-up.

Yet now Republic (protractedly and painfully recorded in the long shadow of its predecessor and the unfolding Factory fiasco) is finally declared, and an astonishing thing it is too. No way as wondrous as Technique, it relates more closely to another record from the Sumner/ Peter Hook/ Stephen Morris canon altogether Joy Division’s Closer. Though technologically poles apart, both share a gothic, grandiose sound and a sense of impenetrable darkness, enveloping doom. Closer was one of those records that had journalists screaming ”sonic cathedral”. Well, Republic is also the full aural basilica (tiled in black) and not a little scary.

Musically, New Order have replaced Technique’s romantic softness with a harsher, metallic techno edge and flailing sweeps of synthetic cinematics. There’s muscle here too, as (on, for instance, the sinewy shuffle-beats of Ruined In A Day and Special, or the animal growl of Chemical), Hook and Morris prove once more what a gigantic rhythm section they can be. Producer and PSB collaborator Stephen Hague does his usual best to polish and beautify but there's no escape from the clinging blackness.

As for those lyrics, New Order were never going to get mistaken for They Might Be Giants, but Sumner has worked here from a palette almost entirely composed of wistfulness, regret and bitterness. Enigmatic as ever, the words to Special, Times Change and Chemical hint heavily at being about the collapse of Factory (source of much of New Order's ferocious independence), and if Liar - ”you've betrayed me” - doesn't refer to Tony Wilson, then Peter Hook is a member of Everything But The Girl.

Brooding, sometimes brilliant, Republic stops just short of being a great New Order album. Most other bands, however, would sandpaper their own eyeballs to make something this fine.****

Danny Kelly