New Order
Get Ready

Distributed by
London Records

Year: 2001

Rating: 9/10

Cat. No: 8573 89621-2

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Dry Bar, Manchester's most famous arch-miserabalist goth disco divas return to the fray after a hiatus of eight years with an album that is easily the match of anything from their past catalogue. If the 1990's saw New Order happy to merely tread water - a few headline Reading shows and 1993's Republic album notwithstanding - Get Ready signals a real return to what they do best - setting the controls for the heart of the city with that familiar mixture of lush sky-kissing melodies, sinewy bass lines and those hypnotic sequenced rhythms that have defined the band since its inception back in the early eighties.

Make no mistake - from opening track, and current single, Crystal through to the final Run Wild, this is classic New Order. With a little help this time from their friends - Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins on Turn My Way and Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie and Andrew Innes on Rock The Shack the album is a confident, swaggering, bass-slung low, head-held high tour-de-force from a band whose time, by rights, should have gone the same way as The Hacienda, The Factory and all those other icons of a long gone pre-post-modern Manchester.

For a band with a collective age of around 175 the sheer manic pop thrills evident on this album are nothing short of staggering.

Perhaps as a nod to the current musical zeitgeist there is more emphasis on guitars this time round but the band havent strayed too far from the tried and tested formula that has served them well over the years - including, of course, the obligatory naff lyrics (pace Slow Jam and "the afternoon was very clear, the sun was beating down on me. I was thirsty for a beer, then I had to go to sea." Perhaps more Ivor Biggun than Ivan Novello, but, hey the lyrics are hardly - have never been - the point, at least not when you have sumptious tunes and Hooky's bass-as-lead guitar doing its usual thing across the the 10 tracks on display here.

Get Ready? Get Set. Go Buy!

Review copyright © Gary Thorogood, 2001.