New Order
Get Ready
On Sale Now
For $13.75

After eight years apart and a host of dodgy side projects, Manchester’s finest finally reunite for a new record that is a study in contrasts. And New Order sound positively revitalized on Get Ready, only the seventh record in their twenty-year career.

On the opening track and first single “Crystal,” the quiet bed of Gillian Gilbert’s synths and angelic female voice of Dawn Zee are only a prelude before the guitars and Stephen Morris’s drum machines break in. They’re followed (of course) by Peter Hook’s trademark lyrical bass lines and Bernard Sumner’s uninterested vocals. But it’s what’s going on around those two familiar elements that holds your attention. The slick, slightly dull sound of 1993’s Stephen Hague-produced Republic is replaced by near constant sonic shifts that make it almost a requirement you give the song a few spins right away just to hear everything that’s going on. Producer Steve Osborne and a team of engineers including Mark ‘Spike’ Stent help keep things from spinning out of control.

The song is followed by “60 Miles An Hour,” one of the record’s catchiest moments. Carried along by Hook’s riffing, it sounds both familiar and strange.

Sumner shares vocal duties with ex-Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan on “Turn My Way” which makes one wonder whether his presence is a calculated effort to seek American chart success or, as they claim, just a longtime New Order fan fulfilling a dream. Regardless, it’s a really good song with some neat backward whooshing sounds and lyrics about not wanting to be like the little people or something.

“Vicious Streak” is hypnotic but a bit lightweight for the band with its ticky-tack electronic beats and Sumner’s bad junior high poetry: “What am I gonna do / I feel like I’m on fire / If you only knew / That you’re the object of desire. But “Primitive Notion” has a lot more going on, driven by Hook’s bass, a stutter step beat and lots of interesting synth and guitar sounds. In short, it sounds like the New Order of old, circa Brotherhood maybe.

“Slow Jam” has a pretty good groove somewhere amidst its burping synths and power jangle guitars but Sumner just doesn’t sound into it on the monotone verses: “The afternoon was very clear / The summer’s beating down on me/ I got thirsty for a beer / Then I had to go see you.”

He seems more at home in the rough around the edges rock and roll of “Rock the Shack,” on which guitar figures prominently. It’s a bit of a clumsy contraption of a song really but it’s easy to appreciate the spirit that went into it. “I need some armor for my flesh / I need to stop and take a rest / I’ve been wide-eyed but couldn’t see / I stand accused of being me,” Sumner sings. Okay, somebody does need to tell him not everything needs to rhyme. And what does the “rock the shack” chorus have to do with anything?

“Someone Like You” which follows is much more dense with lots of synth noises and beats. And on the driving “Close Range” it’s easy to get hypnotized by the overlapping vocals and nice melody and forget that this music was created by actual humans.

You won’t make that mistake with the record’s final track, “To Run Wild.” It’s easily the warmest sounding song on the record, effortlessly sliding between the acoustic sounds of the analog realm and the synths of the digital world and back again. The song mentions Jesus and Jehovah a couple of times and works its way to the repeated line “Good times around the corner” before concluding with the couplet “I’m gonna live till I die / I’m gonna live to get high.” Weird, but really nice.

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