New Order
Music Complete
(Mute)
Four stars
Manchester's New Order have enjoyed a spectacularly uneven and incomplete career. They took eight years to release their first five albums, beginning with Movement in 1981, and another 26 years to double that total.
So what of that 10th album, the rather ambitiously titled Music Complete? The portents are hardly good. Peter Hook, he of the trademark low-slung bass guitar and the man often credited with shaping that very distinctive New Order sound, left the band years ago amid rancour that still rages.
That said, Gillian Gilbert, another of the band's founder members, is back after missing the occasionally wonderful Waiting for the Sirens Call (2005) and the far more prosaic Lost Sirens (2013).
If Hook was always keen to captain the ship, jostling for position with singer Bernard Sumner, Gilbert was generally content to toil in the engine room. It’s proved a more than equitable swap: there’s more fire in the belly and much more togetherness among the crew.
It's also a progressive album in the sense that if its opening track, Restless, adds little to the New Order story, each subsequent track adds lustre to their legacy. By the time you reach the third track, Plastic, featuring Sumner singing in the mode of a faux Bryan Ferry over a Donna Summer-style driving disco beat, you're almost completely sold on the band's re-emergence. La Roux's Elly Jackson, who appears on three of Music Complete's tracks, anchors the track perfectly.
Tutti Frutti follows, which nods heavily to the band's 1988 club classic, Fine Time. Jackson is back for more here, too, jousting with Sumner, and reminding the listener that New Order's frontman was always such a good vocal foil to work with.
Seasoned New Order fans are likely to scratch their heads a little when listening to Stray Dog, featuring Iggy Pop talking (yes, talking) about unconditional love and the instability of life, but that is a minor misstep.
Another collaboration delivers what is arguably the album's standout moment. Superheated, which features The Killers' Brandon Flowers – who named his band after the fictional group that appeared in the video for New Order's 2001 glorious comeback single, Crystal – is an epic piece of work.
When Sumner and Flowers sing the album’s closing lyric (“now that it’s over”) you’ll be wishing the New Order revival was only just beginning. Who knows, it may just be.
nmarch@thenational.ae
