New Order "Low-Life" Letter NME

I hope you don't mind me asking, but what with the English ‘O' Level coming up, it might help.

What I want to know is, when Richard Cook says "Hook’s bass lines don’t boom, they hum in an elastic brogue”, when he refers to Albrecht’s "painful” voice, his "tormented” phrasing "straining for the right pitch and missing over and over,” when he says that their lyrics are "absurdly cheap”, "deliberately mundane... faultlines in the music”, and when he describes their music as being "created and performed in a perfect vacuum... attempting no special departures”, is he really trying to say: "New Order are a bunch of boring, talentless bimbos whose inability to sing or play their instruments in tune is matched in embarrassment only by their pathetic lyrics and the general pointlessness of their existence as a group at all.”?

The review of ’Low-Life’ is Richard Cook’s ‘Closer’.

John Charles, Chard, Somerset 

At the last review Richard wrote before departing to put some barbs in The Wire, ‘Low-Life’, apart from being one of the albums of the year was, in fact, his closer. Oh, and the bit about the elastic brogue was actually a reference to Albrecht’s plastic sandals. - AT