tectactoe
User

Reviews 5
Approval 95%

Soundoffs 62
Album Ratings 5812
Objectivity 88%

Last Active 09-06-22 1:37 pm
Joined 09-24-05

Review Comments 8,004

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04.11.22 tec's FUGAZI, Ranked12.12.21 tec's 2021 - Top 50 (100) ♦
12.07.21 Sput's Gym/Fitness Thread10.14.21 tec’s NEW ORDER, Ranked ♦
10.04.21 16th Sput-versary / Overlooked 80s Gems09.22.21 tec tiers: PIZZA TOPPINGS
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tec’s NEW ORDER, Ranked

A.k.a. Joy Division 2.0 - that’s right, I said it! (It may not actually be entirely true, though.)
10New Order
Waiting for the Siren's Call

Overall Score | 2.18 | 🌕🌕🌑🌑🌑

🥇 Who’s Joe?
🥈 Krafty
🥉 Turn

What in the generic, overly produced, bargain bin-Oasis ever-loving hell were they thinking with this? *Gah* No words exists that can appropriately express how dreadfully mediocre this is. And that’s the thing—it’s not “bad” in the sense that the music totally sucks or is too off-beat or maligned or shoddily composed or whatever. It’s just remarkably innocuous in any and every possible sense. I swear to god the exact second I finished the album, I could nary remember a song from it. Re-listening even to the top three tracks I’ve listed above, I reach the same ambivalent conclusion: “These are…fine, at best; but I would also be fine should I never hear them again as long as I live.” Sometimes it’s better to be downright offensive or experimental or tilted—just be *interesting* for Christ’s sake.
9New Order
Republic

Overall Score | 2.32 | 🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑

🥇 Regret
🥈 World
🥉 Spooky

Winner of “Worst New Order Album Cover”—yes, even over WAITING FOR THE SIREN’S CALL, whose blatant minimalism at least mimics the nonchalant carelessness of the music therein. REPUBLIC’s cover, on the other hand, is simply dumb beyond comprehension. You’ve got the Norwegian black metal church burning portrait on the left and unbearably cheesy Coppertone sunblock ad vibes on the right—what either of them have to do with the tunes on the album escapes me. Unfortunately said tunes aren’t necessarily *better* by any measure; the only (very minor) highlight is also the album’s opener (“Regret”), meaning you can mentally coast for the remaining 40-some minutes without worrying about missing anything noteworthy. Not *quite* as offensively ineffectual as SIREN’S CALL - but close. Marks the beginning of the slump from which New Order would never quite recover.
8New Order
Get Ready

Overall Score | 2.40 | 🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑

🥇 Crystal
🥈 Primitive Notion
🥉 Close Range

Suffers from many of the same problems as SIREN’S CALL—most notably the unpleasant Oasis-aping and overall generic radio-rockisms—but at least occasionally presents itself with a pulse and some sense of identity, however minute. Another issue is that this fifty-minute album felt double that—there’s no reason most of these songs should be closing in on five minutes in length, especially since they all rely on nothing more than the boring repetition of traditional rock song structures with none of the unctuously catchy choruses or phrases required to pull off such formulaic laziness. Surprisingly different from its predecessor, but only a marginal improvement. This veil of banal alternative rock does not suit New Order particularly well; less so when you consider how effervescent, infectious, and progressive most of their previous ventures were.
7New Order
Music Complete

Overall Score | 2.45 | 🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑

🥇 Superheated
🥈 Nothing But a Fool
🥉 Singularity

No, I don’t love this album…BUT, I respect it a lot more than much of New Order’s 90s-and-beyond work because it finally showed the guys attempting to be fresh and creative and lively one again (as opposed to bland and hackneyed and vapid). And, ultimately, I think there’s a halfway decent album buried somewhere in here, but there are also a handful of tracks that make me wince and recoil with secondhand embarrassment—e.g. : “The Game”, the strangely beloved “Tutti Frutti” or, by god, “Stray Dog”. But again, I’d opt for those eminently more divisive tracks than artistic complacency. And, I might be alone in thinking so, “Superheated” is upper echelon, would probably land somewhere in my personal top twenty (spit-balling) New Order tracks, and makes for a supreme album closer, harking back to their glory days.
6New Order
Lost Sirens

Overall Score | 2.56 | 🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑

🥇 I’ll Stay With You
🥈 Californian Grass
🥉 Hellbent

Funny that these are the “leftovers” or cutting-room sinew of SIREN’S CALL because they sound markedly different, to the extent that I’d have a hard time imagining any single song here fitting snugly among SIREN’S CALL’s track list. (I guess that’s why they were snipped, after all, but to contemplate that they were supposedly written during the same period shows that the band had two discrete sounds with which they were toying.) I don’t hate anything here except “Shake It Up” (physically repulsive) but merely think the album peaks with “decent” and is moreover calibrated to the band’s late-era mediocrity. That this is ubiquitously New Order’s lowest rated release is fairly baffling; I wouldn’t expect anyone to rank it highly, of course, but I can at least detect threads of the band from the eighties I once loved smattered randomly throughout.
5New Order
Technique

Overall Score | 3.50 | 🌕🌕🌕🌗🌑

🥇 Love Less
🥈 All the Way
🥉 Run

Massive step up in quality from everything on the list thus far, and ultimately ends up being the last “good” (or even nearly great) album in New Order’s chronology. Wastes no time getting its worst song out of the way first—indeed, opener “Fine Time” is too aggressively acid-drenched dance-club for me to wholly embrace, but luckily things quickly settle into a calmer and more composed groove with the two tracks that immediately follow (which are, conversely, the album’s two major highlights). Threatens to venture back into that sketchy territory with “Round & Round” and “Mr. Disco,” but thankfully never gets there, instead trending toward a more jangly evocation of pop only decorated with hammering synths instead of driven by them. Some will surely scoff at my ranking of this at the bottom of New Order’s glory days (i.e., pre-1990), but that’s not a slam—just a testament to the greatness of everything before it.
4New Order
Low-Life

Overall Score | 3.75 | 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

🥇 Face Up
🥈 Sooner Than You Think
🥉 Love Vigilantes

An impressively consistent release that blends the best New Order qualities into a perfectly balanced cocktail—you get the groovy synths, the catchy choruses, the jangly guitar licks, the post-punkish drum cadences and melancholic moods, it’s probably the most apt New Order album “for everybody,” or at least the most universal first step into their oeuvre. Not a single track here I don’t like or admire, nothing that even dips as low as “decent” as far as I’m concerned; the album’s biggest flaw, strangely enough, is that it also lacks absolute stunners, the sorts of songs that launch records into canonical status. Everything here is either really good or great, but just shy of truly excellent. Weirdly enough, the crowning achievement also the most overlooked: “Face Up” finds Barnard’s vocals at their most painfully strained in the sort of emotionally torturous way that only New Order could relay.
3New Order
Brotherhood

Overall Score | 3.83 | 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

🥇 Bizarre Love Triangle
🥈 Sooner Than You Think
🥉 Love Vigilantes

When discussing New Order, why does no one have the balls to talk about BROTHERHOOD? Not to imply it’s poorly rated, but that it’s often considered the nadir of their 1980s work boggles my mind. This is loaded with banger after banger, from the sensual buzz of opener “Paradise” to the contagiously jaunty essence of “Way of Life”, to the dreamlike luster of “All Day Long. To say nothing, of course, of the album’s keystone, “Bizarre Love Triangle,” which could arguably serve as New Order’s genuine centerpiece, the apex of their creativity and cultural omnipresence. Only song that isn’t up to par with the rest is—maybe—“Weirdo,” but even that has a certain head-bobbing charm rooted in its simplicity and straightforwardness, bolstered by Bernard’s heartfelt meter and the constant triple-taps on the hi-hat. One of New Order’s strongest releases, and I shan’t be convinced otherwise.
2New Order
Movement

Overall Score | 4.06 | 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

🥇 Dreams Never End
🥈 The Him
🥉 Senses

Unequivocally New Order’s most underrated work. Let the haters spout their “it’s basically just a Joy Division release without Ian Curtis” rhetoric; meanwhile these same dolts are constantly clogging up post-punk message boards with lists of things they’d sacrifice if only they could’ve gotten one more Joy Division record. Heresy to some, I’m sure, but I’d take this over UNKNOWN PLEASURES, or I’d at least have to think very long and very hard before coming to a final decision. (CLOSER…well, that’s another story.) Yes, this basically IS another Joy Division record, but why are we touting that like it’s a bad thing?! Curtis’s nasally and downtrodden vocals are absent, sure, but Bernard gives a worthy emulation in his own, somber way, and the rest of the band brings a remarkable flair that shifts the previous Joy Division demeanor from macabre to frozen and icy.
1New Order
Power, Corruption and Lies

Overall Score | 4.38 | 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗

🥇 Your Silent Face
🥈 Age of Consent
🥉 5 8 6

The contrarian in me desperately wants to find enough flaws in this album to ensure that it doesn’t take the top spot, but the realist in me knows new wave synthpop supremacy when he hears it. The most sharply focused and realized effort that New Order would ever put forth—it contains not only their absolute best track (“Your Silent Face”) but also their second-most recognizable, and probably second best (“Age of Consent”). Those wondering “where’s Blue Monday?” shouldn’t worry, either, because “5 8 6” is, by many accounts, Blue Monday v2.0, significantly improved and reimagined. Sad boys lingering onto the post-punk image will find solace in “We All Stand,” while fans of The Smiths should make fine acquaintances with “The Village” and “Leave Me Alone.” Meanwhile tracks like “Ultraviolence” and “Ecstasy” prove worthy steppingstones. It’s a New Order all-you-can-eat buffet—what’s there not to love?
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