New Order: Lost Sirens
New Order
Lost Sirens
(Warner)
Letās face it, as important as New Orderās legacy is, the band has been dialing it in for a while now. The fact that the groupās new album,Ā Lost Sirens, is just eight songs, mostly leftover from 2005ās Waiting for the Sirensā Call, certainly doesnāt help.
New Order has settled into that perfectly average middle-aged category that so many of their 80′s peers have found themselves in (looking at you, Echo & The Bunnymen), and the songs here provide very few surprises or much to latch onto, let alone stomp your feet to.
āCalifornian Grassā and āIāll Stay With Youā exemplify standard mid-tempo, minor-key pop, and while āSugarcaneā has nice throbbing bass and a bouncy dance-friendly breakdown halfway through, the callous-rock-star-who-needs-to-turn-his-life-around lyrics are pretty corny, and the melody isnāt all that memorable, of course delivered with Bernard Sumnerās notoriously deadpan half-sung vocals.
There are some winning highlights though; the previously-released āHellbentā has a great groove, with spacious female backing vocals and Peter Hookās signature lead bass lines. The remixed version of Waiting For the Sirensā Call track āI Told You SoāĀ is good too, turning down the electronic pulse of the original for a more pysch-rock vamp that sounds very much in league with The Velvet Undergroundās early stuff.
But I canāt imagine Lost Sirens being of interest to many other than devoted New Order fans; the pop glory days are certainly long behind them and by the sounds of things, there isnāt really much left to look forward to.