Age of Consent's bright and catchy bass riff and keyboard patterns light up the room. Even Bernard's words about a failure of communication in a relationship sounded happy if you didn't listen to the lyric. And, yes, you could tap your toes or do the hip shake jerk all afternoon. If the funereal We All Stand bring back memories of Closer the arrangement is still sparser and lighter than it would have been. The mood is eerie rather than depressing. The Village brings back the brightness. "Our love is like the flowers," sings Bernard over busy and happy rhythms and textures that were fast becoming signature, guitar and keyboard tickles.
Notably absent from the production is the legendary figure of Martin Hannett. What he would have made of any of this is the stuff of guesses. The band took charge of production. When the joy of The Village fades into the mostly rhythmic introduction to 5 8 6 we can't imagine the old team adding atmosphere. This fades into the main body of the song which emerges from a low rumble into a busy electronic shuffle that sounds like someone tinkered a little with the Blue Monday midi programming. This, like all the songs on the old side one, allows textures and moods to speak more forwardly than individual songs and that plays perfectly well, even with the slower moments.
Side two brings us the open window on a summer day of Your Silent Face which begins with a synthesiser pattern so effortless and soothing you feel as though you're floating when it comes on. This opens on to a huge electronic strings chord progression that feels like a royal procession. Bernard's thinner melodica (haunting on In a Lonely Place) pleases. His vocal is calm and mid range. The strange lyrics report an experience that has left someone either apathetic or traumatised but beyond communication. At first the line, "why don't you piss off," sounds contemptuous, a cheap joke at the end of a hard won lyric. But the more I hear it the less I think it's the song's narrator and more the one who had the dark experience. This might belie the beauty of the musical arrangement (the closest, incidentally, that they ever got to sounding like Kraftwerk) but whatever personal motivation for the words the tension between the weary voice and the sublime grandeur of the music always compels me to either stop what I'm doing and give it all the attention I have or stop it and play it when I can listen only to it.
Ultraviolence plays like a disco march without the keyboards. The lyrics seem to bear the title out for once, with imagery of assault and consoling advice to move past a traumatic memory. The impersonality of the arrangement and subdued vocal add a creepy air and feel like a memory that encases the one recalling. gives me the shivers every time I hear it.
Ecstasy is mostly instrumental with a processed, robotic voice chanting something unintelligible as well as a lot of whispering. The strident dance groove is like 5 8 6 and might as well evoke a intoxication as just plain ol' dancing.
The album ends on Leave Me Alone which has the now familiar New Order interplay between a big loping chorused bass and plinking guitar riff on the high frets that so many bands o'er the globe lifted wholesale. Bernard's words are melancholy, evoking failure of communication. To an exhausted person, everyone looks weary. Still, there's a lovely intrigue about: "but for these last few days, leave me alone."
As with Movement you could go through the words and the way the music sounds and make a case for the continued haunting of Ian Curtis over this band. It would be years before they could be heard in their own right. However, this time the band offered a constantly developing approach that would take them to moments of inspiring greatness. If this record sounds a little too much like mood over songwriting it might simply be a desire to sound as candid as they could. Peter Saville's artwork is a triumph, a lush painting of a bouquet interrupted by digital coding, keeping things both beautiful and always a little disturbing.
And that works well by being subtle. This was not the new band's Unknown Pleasures, it was the state of things as they were. As with Movement, they left the big hit single off the album so it couldn't diminish what was there. What was there was something shared by other significant artists at the end of the free wheeling post punk years before so much of it was absorbed by a hungry mainstream. There was enough beauty here for a few car commercials, for sure, but too much murky shade for the big bucks world. Ok, so the next single after this was one song mixed four times which did not feel like fan service in 1983. But if you had this LP that might have given you a secret smile.
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