New Order may be gone, but it'll take a while before any of their members' follow-up bands feel like more than side projects. A group like Bad Lieutenant-- including Bernard Sumner and latter-day Order member Phil Cunningham, with Stephen Morris also on hand-- is always going to be compared, rather than considered.
In that sense-- and that sense only-- it's a good thing Never Cry Another Tear is such an unassuming album: It's so breezily unambitious as to make the comparison feel unfair, even when you can't avoid it. It's all too common for famous musicians to talk about how they made a record mostly for their own amusement, but this album really does feel like that: relaxed, not overthought, indeed hardly thought at all. Sumner, guitarist Cunningham, and third key member Jake Evans are happy to share your attention, even if it means everything on the record is a minute too long to keep it. "Running Out of Luck" starts purposefully and wanders happily away into indifferent jangle-rock; "Head Into Tomorrow" switches wistful guitar figures for draggy vocals from Evans. It's as if the musicians are passing the spotlight between them like a game controller-- Not sure how to do this bit. Fancy a go, mate?
With the electronics mostly set aside for an album Sumner is making with Jacques Lu Cont, what Bad Lieutenant have to offer is guitar rock. A specifically British strain of guitar rock, in fact, with the rhythm section sidelined and the guitars themselves often blending into a mid-range soup with keyboards and backing vocals. It's been one of the staple sounds of UK music-- and specifically Manchester music-- since Britpop-- and songs like "Runaway" and "Shine Like the Sun" are steeped in it. You can hear echoes here of James, latter-day Oasis, and John Squire's Seahorses.
Grim names to invoke, and thankfully Bad Lieutenant aren't fully in that leaden company-- Sumner's offhand anti-charisma means the record never strains for effect when he's singing, and there's at least one pretty idea in every song, even if it usually gets drowned. The moody, Doves-ish "Twist of Fate" and the thoughtful "Dynamo", with its "Won't Get Fooled Again" keyboard, are the best and most coherent things here. "Summer Days on Holiday" is more typical, though. It has Sumner's best performance on the album, filled with enigmatic threat. But that gets lost as the verses slide into one of those functionally soaring Britrock choruses, and both sit badly with the record's most pointlessly pyrotechnic guitar work. Underpinning it all is perhaps the thinnest drum sound Stephen Morris has ever been near. Like most Bad Lieutenant tracks, it never quite coheres.
Of all the former New Order members, Sumner has (thanks to Electronic) the best track record outside the band, but Bad Lieutenant are strolling along a familiar road here: like previous breakaways Monaco or the Other Two, this record meanders through a set of passable songs that ultimately decline to move or enthrall you. It's another chance, I guess, to reflect on the curious workings of gestalt and the casual, inscrutable heartbreak these people could create together. Sumner and Morris helped make some of the greatest popular music of the late 20th century: They have nothing left to prove, but does that have to be so obvious?
