New Order are giants, the four-piece that saved guitar pop. At a terribly dull time in the '80s, they brought the rush of possibilities of electronic music to the knuckle-dragging indie masses and added sophistication, sex and mystery to their genre of choice, a genre dying on its arse. Every guitar band that has added electronica to its palette without fear of the sky falling in – from U2 to The Killers – owes New Order a cut.
So is it disappointing that their recent music is so solid, so conservative? Well… no. If you don‘t have anything to prove, then don’t prove anything. Waiting for the Siren’s Call is dextrous danceable electro-guitar pop from a hobby band that long since figured out its own sound. It’s nothing they haven’t been doing since Republic. It’s enough.
You just can’t argue with New Order on form. ‘Who’s Joe’ opens the album with strings and grandiose keyboards that suggests a glacial Low-inspired epic; it morphs into straight-ahead indie rock, but as with ‘Hey Now What You Doing’, disappointment at the lack of adventure of the approach and dear God, the laziness of the titles, is leavened by the fleetness of foot and glorious, irresistible, effortless energy.
They still interweave melodic bass and slicing guitar into crashing choruses like no-one else. This gift is in their DNA and on Sirens it transforms even the story of a crap hangover into a spectral experience (‘Morning, Night and Day’). ‘Turn’ barrels along crisply, like a Bugatti on an early morning motorway, while betraying some of Sumner’s legendary lyrical naïveté; though not nearly so much as the first single.
‘Krafty’, a social commentary of sorts, is the weak link, an abysmal song. It’s monotonous and lyrically dumbfounding: first patronising to mere mortals with day jobs (“Some people get up at the break of day/Gotta go to work before it gets too late/It ain’t the way it has to be”) then clumsy and preachy when critiquing TV (“They’ve got violence, wars and killing too/All shrunk down in a two-foot tube/But out there the world is a beautiful place/With mountains, lakes and the human race”). These are the kind of rhymes that make you reach for a large, straight, twelve-year-old Scotch.
If you’re looking for them to redeem themselves, though, they do so with ease on ‘Working Overtime’, which closes out Sirens with a splash of vibrant primary colour. Twenty-five years ago in May, an aeon ago in the lifetime of a pop group, Ian Curtis died with Iggy Pop’s The Idiot on his turntable, and now his friends round off their album with a song that could be burned onto the Stooges’ debut album without anyone batting an eye. They have never looked backwards as a band and they’re not given to open displays of emotion on their records, but I wonder whether this is New Order’s subtle, joyful tribute to their absent friend. It’s a brave and beautiful way to bow out of a fine record.