Music Complete a slow obsession

They’re missing Peter Hook. Without his bass leading the charge or waiting to, everyone lays back. Cool lapsing into cold. Heatless — but seamless — groove slipping between disco, disco with electronica synth touches, razor-chop Chic-funk, and my golly, acoustic guitar. It creeps and slides and glides as the sages once wrote about some other Blob.

They’re missing Peter Hook, but I went from the blahs to a few spins, then a few more spins, then obsession. Slow slippage counts for something, so does shyness fighting compulsion for connection. It’s the sound of an almost-empty disco, absent the sweat of expected bodies, and over robo-beats, the DJ turns on his public-address mike. It’s the life he’s been having.

Cool communication compassion trumps content, so I’ll grade lyrics on a curve. Some frustrate (“This love is poison/ But it’s like gold”), some frighten (“Well he ain’t got nothing/ Not even a hole”). All play to the kindness of strangers/listeners. Backup singers follow Bernard Sumner’s lead through shin-skinning scansion. Loyalty. A raspy doddering drunk tries to explain life in clichés. His grasp on the well-worn grants urgency through his banked passion, so it matters much less how the raspy doddering drunk is Iggy Pop.

In the end, Bernard’s calling his lover “girl,” shocking obsecration by Bernard standards. And ceding power to his “girl,” even though, or perhaps because, she’s already left. Unfinished business. He cares for her cooly enough at first. But slide and glide with it. Again. The ice does begin to melt.

• Album: Music Complete
• Artist: New Order
• Label: Mute
• Songs: (1) Restless (2) Singularity (3) Plastic (4) Tutti Frutti (5) People on the High Line (6) Stray Dog (7) Academic (8) Nothing But a Fool (9) Unlearn This Hatred (10) The Game (11) Superheated