This isn't a new New Order album, exactly. During the long, expensive sessions that produced 2005's Waiting for the Sirens' Call, New Order recorded a small pile of extra material, the idea being that they'd get a few more songs down after the subsequent tour and call it another album. But they stopped playing together after 2006, then bassist Peter Hook left the band acrimoniously, and the two camps spent a few years bickering at one another. However, since the return of keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, they've been touring again as, effectively, an oldies act-- minus Hook. (Their set lists last year featured, typically, all of two post-1993 songs, and encores from the Joy Division catalogue.)
Singer/guitarist Bernard Sumner has called Lost Sirens "a non-completed album, [the likes of] which we've never released before." That's not necessarily evident from listening to it, and they've certainly released a lot of more ragged material in the past. These are densely packed, finely detailed arrangements in New Order's late-80s rock-with-keyboards mode-- much more recognizable as the work of the band that recorded "Dream Attack" than the one that recorded "Fine Time". Sumner's lyrics are, as usual, almost half-baked a tad more often than they're almost profound, and his voice still sounds exactly as clear, earnest, and likeably strained as it did when he was a babyfaced ex-punk with a ridiculous haircut.
A lot of what made 80s-era New Order special, though, was their perpetual fascination with body music and the culture around it-- the way they always latched onto the dance music of the moment, from the tail-end of disco to Latin freestyle to acid house, and reworked it in their own idiom. Lost Sirens obviously can't suggest much familiarity with what's going on in dance clubs in 2013, and it doesn't suggest what was going on there when it was recorded close to a decade ago; the clock stopped for their groove sense around the time they first broke up. ("Hellbent" would sound totally natural mixed out of Primal Scream's Madchester anthem "Loaded.")
Peter Hook's presence on Lost Sirens is, understandably, somewhat muted-- there are a few of his signature fretless bass solos scattered around the album, but this is very much a guitar-driven, Sumner-centered record. Aside from occasional New Order-y instrumental flourishes, it wouldn't be a surprise to learn that these were actually recordings by Sumner's 90s band, Electronic. Even so, every time Hook's bass rears up in the mix-- the lead to the chorus of "Californian Grass", or the instrumental break in "I've Got a Feeling"-- it's a reminder of how well Sumner, Hook, and Stephen Morris always played together, and how their collaboration had an instrumental identity as distinctive as any band's. It's worth noting that the titles of both of those songs echo the Beatles' postponed, bickered-over swan song, Let It Be.
"It's been 10 long years since I've been home," begins "I Told You So", the one song here reprised from Sirens' Call. (The very different mix here sounds more like a rewrite of "All Tomorrow's Parties".) That's a doubly barbed line in this context, made more so by how Sumner follows it a moment later: "It's an occupation I don't like/ But it pays the rent and turns on the light." Maybe New Order have some more albums in them; maybe with Gilbert back in the fold they'll recast themselves as a singles act again. Maybe not. These remnants of their most recent burst of creative fecundity are a decent way for them to go out, if they are indeed going to be playing the hits to pay the rent from here on out. As an album, Lost Sirens isn't at all an embarrassment: it's a document of a band whose range and reach, rather than power, are what has been diminished.
