Tonight’s selections from New Order’s fifth album, 1988’s Technique. Start to finish, an excellent album. A perfect album of 80s synth pop, rock and dance tunes.
Upon its release in January 1989, Technique entered the UK Albums Chart at number one, providing the ultimate mainstream validation for New Order, who had always fundamentally been a band of outsiders occasionally foraying into the mainstream and making crossover raids on the charts. It was also the solitary chart-topping album for the legendary Factory label. The success of the album led to New Order being commissioned to record the official anthem for England’s 1990 football World Cup campaign, ‘World In Motion’, featuring the legendary John Barnes rap. Technique was also one of a triptych of incredible albums from Manchester-based bands that captured the zeitgeist of the acid-house/rock crossover that was beginning to sweep Britain’s youth culture in 1989, along with The Stone Roses’ self-titled debut and Happy Mondays’ Bummed, placing them at the vanguard of the most revolutionary moment in British music since punk.
But for New Order themselves, the beautiful brightness and success of Technique could not properly repair the frayed relations between the band, particularly between Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook. They called a brief hiatus for the various members to pursue side-projects (the best of which was Electronic, Sumner’s hook-up with The Smiths’ Johnny Marr) before reconvening for 1993’s solid but unspectacular Republic. For many, Technique remains New Order’s zenith, displaying their prowess both as an alternative rock outfit for indie kids and as cutting-edge pioneers in crossover dance music. It’s their most consistently perfect moment from an entire decade of similarly wonderful albums and singles. — The Student Playlist
Round And Round
The album was, quite fittingly, recorded in Ibiza. The band had decided to record the album abroad on Hook’s request after he had become fed up with recording records in “dark and horrible” studios in London. While there, the band soaked in their environment and as it transpires, were particularly influenced by Balearic club music. Stephen Morris described the sound of the Balearic beat clubs on Ibiza as “mad!” before detailing: “They’d put an acid record on and then the next one would be a Queen one—it was schizophrenic, really. It’d be something really Spanish and then something really daft. It was a really odd mix but it all seemed to make sense when you were there. I don’t know why that was. Maybe because we were all a bit out of our brains.”
It seems the group perhaps had a little too much fun in Ibiza and, upon their return to the UK, the album wasn’t quite complete and so they spent some time in Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios to polish the record off. Sumner described Gabriel’s studio as a “much more sober atmosphere”. The album was completed in 1988 and the group were happy with this new blend of recent influences with their classic sound. Peter Hook described the record: “Technique sounds fantastic […] considering it’s not an Ibizan dance record. I think it catches a summer sound really brilliantly.”
The LP was a triumph with a great response from the public and critics alike. It rose through the charts to become New Order’s first album to reach number one in the UK Album Chart. The album is a brilliantly seamless blend, with some tracks following New Order’s usual style in songs like ‘Love Less’ and ‘Run’, but then departs into newfound territory in tracks like ‘Fine Time’ and ‘Vanishing Point’ where the addition of acid house inspired synth tracks can be heard. The album still retains that all-important New Order identity though, thanks to Peter Hooks unique high string bass technique and Sumner’s delicate vocals. — Far Out Magazine
All the Way
They sound, for the first time since Movement, like an indie band-- but a superb one: Four musicians at ease with each other and themselves, combining on tracks like "Way of Life" to provide a feast of hooks that leaves the listener breathless and delighted. Elsewhere, "1963" and "True Faith" suggested they had the songs to be chart fixtures on relatively conventional terms; "Touched By the Hand of God" and the pointless "Blue Monday '88" hinted they might be running out of steam.
Instead they made arguably their best record. Past the red herring of "Fine Time"-- a dance music band "going dance," and one of those rare gags that stays entertaining-- Technique takes the easy interplay and full-band sound of Brotherhood and drenches it in good Ibiza vibes. Each track, as it leads you into a fluid maze of melody, is a hug from a stranger you've known all your life. "Nothing in this world can touch the music that I heard as I woke up this morning," sang an awed-sounding Sumner, catching the album's mood perfectly. — Pitchfork
Run
This applies to ‘Round And Round’ in particular. After the stop-start-shift of ‘Fine Time’ – itself a razor-sharp exercise in element interacting with element and then spinning off from it at a right angle – this is even more insanely spot on. Listen to the difference in rhythms between verses and choruses, how Bernard Sumner has a ridiculously good ‘anti-flow’ flow (and even a call and response with himself at one point, all the more striking for being the sole moment like it – if it wasn’t there it might never have been missed, now that it is there it can’t be ignored), and how nothing stops – everything is pure fluidity at high speed. Compared to, say, the slow burn build of the extended ‘The Perfect Kiss’ or the triumphalist progression of ‘True Faith’, this is spiraling choreography that gets more involved as it goes until it smashes into echo and dies.
The division between ‘rock’ and ‘dance’ is ultimately artificial though, thus the quotes. The fluidity of this album, how it does feel of a piece, lies in how easy the whole idea between switching from, say, live to synth drums and back again is, how sometimes synths are more prominent and sometimes the guitars are and sometimes it’s all a specific balance and then it changes again. It’s so ridiculously unforced.
Also, this album is so beautifully bright. It is not without darker moments, the unnerving sense of threat and desperate clawing back in ‘Guilty Partner’ led specifically by Peter Hook’s bass, but something about it calls to mind the description, however inaccurate, I read once about eighties pop being an incarnation of the reflection of CD lasers bouncing off glittering piles of cocaine. The high synth melody on the second verse of ‘Round And Round’, Sumner’s ear for lovely acoustic guitars, the sweet rising/falling electronic chime on ‘Vanishing Point’ and much more. Combine that with the sense granted by the album’s precision and one can imagine this as a high-flying instance of collage, like the album was never written and conceived as a series of songs in a ‘classic’ sense, however you wish to define classic. And then of course there’s ‘Run’, their "John Denver song" – except John Denver never made so perfectly on-point melancholy as that part where it all strips back to synth string and drums and then Steven Morris quickly switches to a louder but just as steady beat. — The Quietus
Fine Time
What I can say is that all nine songs from Technique are perfectly sequenced. Listening to it, coming home from work, I realized how it seamlessly flows together like a treasured short story collection coming to life. An album like this deserves the best kind of reissue; alas this version does it no justice. This and the editions of New Order’s first four albums—Movement, Power Corruption & Lies, Low-Life and Brotherhood are part of a re-release event that was supposed to cement the band’s greatness with these remastered CDs. [...]
What I’ve always loved about New Order is that the band put poignant meaning behind their electric dance beats. It wasn’t just dance music just to shake your ass to; Bernard’s lyrics echoed my life beyond the dance floor. In many ways, songs like “Vanishing Point” gave my static life rhythmic colors with true faith lyrics that kept me going when I felt lost and a lonely soul during high school.
And they gave him away
Like in whistle down the wind
By the look on his face
He never gave in
I never gave in because of albums like Technique. — Treblezine
Vanishing Point
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