I like New Order. Oddly enough though, this is an album I can admire, and accept as good, but I've never really got on with it. I've just relistened to it and have only a few disjointed thoughts as to why.
From the vantage point of 2020 this album was made at an interesting time. New Order are band with obvious roots, via Joy Division, in the whole punk and post-punk world and are, just about, still a kind of rock band. Yet they've always dabbled in Electronica as the various '80s dance scene evolved and cross-fertilised with and around them.
It's too simplistic to point at acid house and the album being recorded in Ibiza; this is 1989, just after the second summer of love and Blue Monday, and the height of that Madchester thing which, for me, has always been a curate's egg. New Order are, of course, the centre of the Manchester scene at this point and, of course, on Factory records, just like the Happy Mondays, who I'm not that keen on.
You can sort of hear all that in the record, yes. And it's all very good. But for me it's a hard record to get a handle on, or to like, as many of their other albums- no less electronic- have done. Perhaps it's as simple as that it's too Madchester. But I suspect it's more complicated than that.
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