Truly Great

Few artists have been able to create a perfect album. Off the top of my head, Neil Young's After the Gold Rush stands out. The Smiths' The Queen is Dead is another. Elliott Smith's either/or, Wilco's summerteeth, Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and The Cure's The Head on the Door. Without a doubt, these are albums beyond compare. In their respective genres, you can't do any better than these albums. And New Order, after one near-perfect attempt, pulled off a perfect record only two albums into their career. Power, Corruption & Lies stands as the band's finest hour — an album with nine classic songs, a handful of legendary singles and a sound that opened the floodgates for countless imitators to come gushing through.

Like almost all of New Order's releases, the artwork and design of PCL leaves it shrouded in mystery. Minimal credits, no photos and one singular painting on the cover mark it as an album whose songs speak louder than any external information possibly could. Each song has an identity of its own, distinct and extraordinary. New Order find themselves distancing further from their previous incarnation as Joy Division, Power, Corruption & Lies being the definitive document of the Manchester band's unique sound.

The addition of Gillian Gilbert made a sharp difference for the band, taking the sound of Movement and turning the synth sounds more accessible, though still artsy and unique. The influence of Kraftwerk is prevalent on this collection, as the gothic washes of dark electronics have been put aside. Still, Bernard Sumner's guitar and Peter Hook's bass are more pronounced as well, combining their joyous guitar pop leanings with a new, cutting edge dance approach. And though Bernard Sumner was far from Leonard Cohen, lyrically, his simple, straightforward vocals mixed well with this new, artistic hybrid between post-punk and electronic music.

The nine tracks on this album are all extremely memorable and magnificent in their own right. Leadoff track "Age of Consent" became one of the band's better known singles, driven by Hook's high-note bass riffing and Stephen Morris' high-speed disco-punk beats. The second track, "We All Stand," by contrast was much more atmospheric and dubby, while Sumner painted a more oblique picture with his lyrics: "Three miles to go/ at the end of the road/there's a soldier waiting for me." "The Village," which comes next, is much simpler and more synthetic sounding, with the basic synth melody taking center stage next to Barney's monosyllabic rhyme scheme: "Our love is like the flowers/ the rain and the sea and the hours." All of these songs are brilliant, yet none of them prepare us for what's to come.

Track four, "5 8 6," should be taught in college classes. It's simple, yet so artfully complex at the same time. During the intro, it's hardly even a song. Drum machines sputter out the occasional beat and synthesizers belch out a note or two, eventually picking up a little bit in speed. The song sounds like a robot powering up, and eventually does, into a gigantic post-punk dance track that could have been called "Blue Monday — The Prelude." Which is to say, it almost sounds like a reformatted and rawer version of their most well known track, which, incidentally, comes next on the album (though some original versions of the album didn't include this track). "Blue Monday" was a breakthrough for New Order and holds the record for best-selling twelve-inch single at 3 million copies sold. However, due to its expensive floppy disc sleeve design, the band actually lost money for each copy sold. Nonetheless, it is a song that's immediately recognizable the instant you hear it. "Blue Monday" is as much of an icon as the band that created it.

Side B is equally intriguing, though in different ways. "Your Silent Face" is Sumner's homage to Kraftwerk, bearing a melody similar to something the arty Germans had done prior. In fact, the working title of the song was "KW1," which stood for Kraftwerk One. It's one of a few songs that shows off Sumner's sense of humor, as he puts it plainly, "You've Caught Me At a Bad Time/So why don't you piss off." "Ultraviolence," whose title was inspired by A Clockwork Orange, is one of the few tracks on the album that could have fit in on Movement, though higher production values made it much brighter and further away from Martin Hannett's early mechanical gloom treatment. The closer, "Leave Me Alone," began with the working title "Only the Lonely" before the band re-named it for release on the album. Strangely, it's a melancholy pop tune that's heavy on guitars and extremely light on synthesizers, ending the album light years away from the disco-centric core.

Every song on Power, Corruption & Lies is absolute genius, which is precisely why it warrants the often dubious adjective "perfect." Clearly, it's not dubious in this case, however. After 22 years, the album has aged rather well, as opposed to, say, Depeche Mode's Speak and Spell. "Blue Monday" still manages to crowd dancefloors and my friends and I have even pulled off impromptu a cappella renditions of "Age of Consent" on bored afternoons. If ever an album deserved the distinction of being "classic," this would be the one.

Similar Albums/Albums Influenced:
LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem
Depeche Mode - Black Celebration
The Postal Service - Give Up


Jeff Terich
05.01.2005