Review Summary: God, drugs and Ian Curtis.
Imagine being a pop star: always on the road away from home, family and friends; surrounded by hangers on; suddenly finding fame and fortune; transformed into a sexual icon; naive teenagers hanging on your every word; plunging headlong into hedonism; your mind swirled by drugs and alcohol. Is it any wonder if you lose a grip on reality? Is it any wonder that so many young men in the music industry lose touch with themselves and end up committing suicide?
This album is haunted by the ghost of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division (New Order's previous incarnation). The opening song
Love Vigilantes (though apparently out of sync with the rest of the album with its formal narrative and almost jaunty guitars and catchy harmonica intro) sets out the main themes: the existence of the dead amongst the living and a yearning for some core human values.
From now on, the songs are massive overreaching edifices of sound, driven by drum machine patterns, soaring synthesizers and relentless bass lines. This could almost be an electronic dance version of U2, circa The Joshua Tree era, with lyrics pervaded with guilt and loss. Nothing exemplifies this more than the classic single
The Perfect Kiss, in which Sumner confesses that his own lifestyle was a complicit factor in the death of his former band mate and school friend.
The rest of the first side continues in the same frenzied vein. The gothic
This Time Of Night has Sumner condemning his stardom as an empty existence. It is as if he has now plunged straight down to hell itself. Consumed with despair, he teeters on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Yet another album highlight, the towering
Sunrise, (which steals gloriously a riff from The Cure's
A Forest), finds Sumner conversing directly with God, desperate for salvation at such a low time in his life.
All these songs seem to revolve around the same issues: loss; alienation; drug dependence; and also art itself. The band were taking tabs of acid as part of their inspiration for the composition of this album, Sumner believing his music came from God or, more vaguely, from outside himself. The use of drugs therefore provides a gateway to accessing that art or music.
The instrumental
Elegia, a requiem for Curtis, signals a more reflective second side to the album with Sumner searching for some kind of moral code to lead his life afresh. The highlight is another single
Subculture, a brooding, melancholic spin on Gloria Gaynor's
I Will Survive, with Sumner living in contemplation and isolation from the outside world, as drums, guitars and synthesizers go beserk all around him. The surprisingly musically upbeat
Face Up closes the album with Sumner taking a good look at himself in the mirror. ("At the start you had a heart, but in the end you lost your friend. Can you see your own dark face? It's dying in a lonely place"). The song lays out the need to face up to the duality of our existence: past and future; youth and age; life and death; that there is good and bad in everything, even ourselves, and that we have to accept that to find some kind of peace.
Regularly cited as one of the best albums of the 80s and in the best UK album ever lists, this album with its huge sweeping synthesizers is very different to the disco dance of "Technique", the arty experimentalism of "Power, Corruption and Lies" or the guitar sprawl of "Brotherhood". It sees New Order confronting the ghost of Ian Curtis and coming out the other side.
