New Order





Remote Control

How They Got Wrong Right

by Van Halen Kurtz

(December 2012)

How autistic spectrum is New Order?

See that world out there,

Make it go away;

You can't change his mind,

Too much working overtime.

Up, down, turn around, please don't let me hit the ground.

Then there was the album, with its ensorcelling, illogical cover. Whoever you were, whichever flag you were flying, "Your Silent Face" unfailingly stopped the clock. Where was that nihilism slithering through the speakers like some contagious tumor? It wasn't embedded in the 2001 sequencer, the frosted string synth, the IBM percussion, the disengaged bass, the forlorn melodica or even the lethargic, disgusted vocals. It was an ambient pain, an asomatous pain, a haunting friction echoed upon the magnetic particles of the commodity. But, wait. "The Village," with its trickling riffs, maneuvers love doom with pathological naïveté. Then, "Leave Me Alone." Those dour intertwining lines of guitar and bass, shifting octaves against common law sense, with the vocalist faltering on sweet-intentioned high notes and grumbled low notes betraying puerile anguish. Sardonic phantoms seem rarely so authentically distressed.

To think on it now, Power, Lies and Corruption might be one the few albums containing filler that nonetheless is a perfect LP. Its uneasy lures remain undamaged and exhumed, a recurring ubiety continually troubling analysis with unobtainable logic, ineffable iconography and unintentional confidence. It remains one of the rarest examples of a new album.

Subsequent singles increased the mystique. "Confusion" amped the funk but retained the unhinged isolation. "Thieves Like Us" was slick and moody but the B-side bundle of "Murder" and, especially, "Lonesome Tonight" projected a beautiful jukebox with precarious wiring. New Order understood outside, they intuited wrong, they x-rayed indecision and fragmentation, every instance in which they polished their surface first, then got around to sanding it, after. The faulty finish was grammatically evident: repetitive machinations, uncommon clumsiness, narrative disconnectivity and obstinate attention to particularized motifs. Mechanical children, bitter batteries, autistic rockstars proscribing identification. Well, except a fixation on colors and numbers anyway. Not to mention dolby propellers. This wasn't disco for disco dancing. This was disco for fetal retreating.

It's called love, and it belongs to everyone but us.

What do I get out of this

I always try, I always miss;

One of these days you'll go back to your home

You won't even notice that you are alone.

Brotherhood came off rancorous, but every New Order album after Power, Lies and Corruption has come into its own with insurrectionary élan. It's the album where Hook started overdubbing bass. And, those shiny acoustic guitars on "Way of Life," which sounded pushy at the time, started something New Order would soon harvest resplendently. The main criticism at the time was Brotherhood was disheveled. And ten years later, the same critics would pine for another jolt of that crude nerve. Deadline album. Why nobody thought of remixing "Paradise" on 12" remains of the several cantankerous what if’s of the band's history; one counterpoint short, perhaps. But Brotherhood, with its irrational ideations and codependent vacuities documented with insouciant befuddlement, has aged as a mad map of blithe despair. No band ever so perseverated upon communication deficiencies. Lest we forget the disoriented accuracy of their most characteristic stanza:

It's no problem of mine

But it's a problem I find

Living a life that I can't leave behind;

But there's no sense in telling me

The wisdom of the fool won't set you free;

But that's the way that it goes

And it's what nobody knows;

Well, every day my confusion grows.

It takes years to find the nerve

To be apart from what you've done,

To find the truth inside yourself

And not depend on anyone.

You may think that I'm out of hand,

That I'm naïve, I'll understand

On this occasion, it's not true;

Look at me,

I'm not you.

Then, almost imperceptibly, a shrink-wrapped square in the Border's or whatever air-conditioned hell is considered the sterile inevitability of mass apathy in the 21st century, and it's New Order rebooted. Here we go again. Refrigerated arpeggio of keys, taser beam of fuzz guitar, artificial brainwaves, braille drumbeats, distressed bass, crumpled antennae, and Sumner groaning with his old insomniac antipathy.

I'm applauded, then forgotten;

It was summer, now it's autumn;

I don't know what to say;

You don't care anyway.

Then came the end. Waiting for the Sirens Call, the imperfect kiss, the hesitant valentine, the garbled horoscope, the telepathic conundrum, the deleted destiny, the reticent question, the ambivalent commitment, the uncomprehending conclusion, the encrypted beacon. Eternity, obviated.

We all want some kind of love;

But sometimes it's not enough.

I got it all wrong

'Cause you were not

The wrong one.

ED NOTE: Van Halen Kurtz's post-punk classic from 1981, The Philosophic Collage Genius EP, is presently in vinyl reissue, available from BDR/Rerun records, St. Louis.