Get Ready

1	Crystal
2	60 Miles an Hour
3	Turn My Way
4	Vicious Streak
5	Primitive Notion
6	Slow Jam
7	Rock the Shock
8	Someone Like You
9	Close Range
10	Run Wild

Barnes & Noble

You gotta hand it to New Order -- having led the post-punk masses to the dance floor at the dawn of the '80s, they've since watched rockers cede to DJs and DJs cede to rockers once again, before emerging just on time for an '80s revival with an album that no critic could accuse of trading on nostalgia. The exhilarating, absorbing Get Ready, the band's first album since 1993's Republic, sees the original lineup warming up their signature icy disco groove with a My Bloody Valentine guitar-pop haze. Bernard Sumner's brilliant deadpan vocals and Peter Hook's bass-driven melody lines still drive this sleek, beat-happy train, but from the first bars of the album opener, "Crystal," scuffed-up guitars summon the harrowing atmospheres of American Psycho and Less than Zero. In New Order's absence, ironic distance and rock-tronica have become standard issue, but the Brit quartet's trademark lyrical ambivalence still unsettles, putting them miles ahead of both modern rock's therapy-speak and dance music's faux-soul histrionics. Take the acoustic guitar- and strings-filled "Run Wild," which sounds like a comfort to a dying friend yet ends with the promise "I'm gonna live to get high." Slippery and faceless as ever -- the "Crystal" video features a band of hipster ingénues miming to the track -- New Order mine tension from Sumner's detached delivery, as incongruous over the churning guitars of "Slow Jam" as in its almost-Hemingway detail ("The sea was very rough/It made me feel sick/But I like that kind of stuff"). Disciples Billy Corgan and Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream chime in on "60 Miles an Hour" and "Rock the Shack," respectively, underscoring not only the relevance of New Order two decades on but their inevitability. For its controlled spasms of passion beneath ever-shifting layers of meaning, Get Ready may be the most thrilling slab of ennui-rock since the heyday of the Velvet Underground. Welcome back, comrades. Mark Schwartz

All Music Guide

Instead of settling down in front of the mixing board for another dance album (a lá Technique or Republic), New Order returned in 2001 with a sound and style they hadn't played with for over a decade. Unsurprisingly bored by the stale British club scene circa 2001, the band opened Get Ready with a statement of purpose, a trailer single ("Crystal") featuring a host of longtime New Order staples: a sublime melody, an inscrutable set of lyrics, a deft, ragged guitar line kicking in for the chorus, and Peter Hook's yearning bass guitar taking a near-solo role. Though there are several allowances for the electronic-dance form New Order helped develop, Get Ready is a very straight-ahead album, their first work in 15 years that's focused on songwriting and performance rather than grafted dance techniques. (Of course, the band proved themselves far more than studio hands at several points, stretching back over twenty years to Joy Division's landmark Unknown Pleasures, as well as later New Order LPs like 1985's Low-life and 1986's Brotherhood.)

Listeners familiar with the blueprint of early New Order work will find much to love on Get Ready, from the tough rockers "60 Miles an Hour" and "Primitive Notion" to pastoral downtempo material like "Turn My Way," "Vicious Streak," and the melodica-driven closer "Run Wild." This naked songcraft, however, does reveal a few of the band's deficiencies. Bernard Summer's lyrics drift toward the inane: "I'll be there for you when you want me to/I'll stand by your side like I always do/In the dead of night it'll be alright/cuz I'll be there for you when you want me to." And the band can't help but identify with a younger generation of music-makers, inviting Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie over for "Rock the Shack" and turning in a dense, chaotic production that's all but de rigeur for Gillespie but very strained for New Order. (The other main collaborative track, with stranded Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, is surprisingly unembarassing.) Even for fans who don't need any convincing, Get Ready is a true "grower," an album that reveal its delicious secrets -- sublime songcraft, introverted delivery, collaborative musicianship -- slowly and only after several listens. John Bush

NME

["8 out of 10"]... They may have been apart for eight years, but less than a minute into opening track, "Crystal," they've slotted back into their own idiosyncratic groove and the years are pouring off them.... Being in New Order never sounded like half as much fun as it does here. Jim Wirth