NEW ORDER
Movement ****
Power, Corruption And Lies *****
Low-Life ***
Brotherhood ***
Technique ****
Rhino/Warner
The warmed-over kitsch that gets sold back to us as ’80s pop culture has made it a terrifically misunderstood era, and no band have suffered more for it than New Order. Aside from being lauded for their roots in Joy Division as well as the success of “Blue Monday” (famously the top-selling 12-inch single of all time), as far as the public at large are concerned New Order are minor hitmakers. Rhino’s double-disc reissues continue the record-company bungling that has characterized the handling of their catalogue, but even that doesn’t overshadow this vital, manifestly important music.

Recorded mere months after the suicide of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis in 1980, Movement is self-evidently both a transitional and hastily recorded album. That doesn’t make it a bad one. Without Curtis’ incantatory vocals, nervous, jittery songs like “Chosen Time” and “Dreams Never End” showed off the band’s ability to project stark, desolate visions with little more than Peter Hook’s eerily processed bass, Gillian Gilbert’s icy keys and producer Martin Hannett’s valleys of echo — at times, Stephen Morris’ drums sound like an army drum corps’ inexorable approach from the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Between 1981’s Movement and 1983’s Power, Corruption and Lies, New Order ditched Hannett, the band discovered dance music in New York, singer/guitarist Bernard Sumner started singing properly and classic singles were made (including the impossibly cheery “Temptation”) that saw them evolving into a dance outfit with astonishingly steady progress.
Power, Corruption and Lies was overshadowed by the success of “Blue Monday,” which preceeded it by two months but wasn’t included on the album. That ought to tell you something about “Monday,” since Power is arguably one of the few perfect albums of the ’80s. It’s certainly aged the best of all New Order discs, not least because its influences have been similarly canonized: the crackling opener “Age Of Consent” sounds like Joy Division on ecstasy; “We All Stand” owes its circular bassline and ominous lyrics to dub and reggae; and “Your Silent Face” is easily the Kraftwerk-worshipping outfit’s most direct homage to their idols. Low-Life, by contrast, sounds dated; “The Perfect Kiss” and “Face Up” transcend their period with sublime songwriting and electro-infused production but if the ’80s revival ever gets round to valorizing feeble disco-pop like “Sooner Than You Think,” take it as a harbinger of the apocalypse.

New Order followed Low-Life with Brotherhood a year later in 1986, and the formula the group had evidently settled on produced equally mixed results. Jaunty rock such as “Weirdo” hearkened promisingly back to Power and “Bizarre Love Triangle” was easily their most confident dance outing since “Blue Monday,” but too many weak moments showed a group who were starting to splinter internally.

They found their renewal in the birth of the rave era, recording 1989’s Technique by day in Ibiza and hitting the clubs by night. That, and the end of Sumner’s marital woes, resulted in a disc that is too exciting to be dismissed as a product of its era. The ’88-style string stabs in “Round & Round” are still electrifying, and Sumner’s famously ham-fisted lyrics (who can top “Tonight I should have stayed at home / Playing with my pleasure zone”?) had become considered meditations on relationships. And with its drums made for jacking and its honking great synth riff, “Fine Time” is possibly the most giddy, gleeful track the band had produced to date.

There’s only one problem with these reissues. While the mixes have been given a crisp remastering job, fans online have identified over 300 audio errors in the bonus discs, ranging from barely-audible clicks and pops to the glaring example on Low-Life album track “Sunrise,” where the left channel actually cuts out for a second or two. Most of the audio problems aren’t as noticeable to casual listeners, but it’s still shocking that Rhino would leave enough mistakes in to cause New Order’s many audiophile fans to return their discs. Rhino has promised UK customers they will be redoing the discs and Warner Japan have, in fact, cancelled the releases entirely; whether the US and Canadian divisions will follow suit will likely depend on sales and fan outrage. If they don’t, these reissues are still the best available. DAVE MORRIS

CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL
Creedence Clearwater Revival ***
Bayou Country ****
Green River ****
Willie and the Poorboys ****
Cosmo’s Factory *****
Pendulum ***
Fantasy/Universal
Compared to their head-tripping ’60s San Francisco peers, Creedence Clearwater Revival were something of a throwback, seeking transcendence not through psychedelics but through the primal, elemental power of blues, country, R&B and gospel. But, even while operating within a traditionalist framework, they were ahead of their time. Their blue-collared, blue-eyed rock ‘n’ soul anticipated the Vietnam/Watergate-propagated malaise of the 1970s, and, in John Fogerty, they had a vocalist who could perfectly embody both the righteous indignation and mournful resignation that the times demanded.

To mark the 40th anniversary of their first album, Fantasy Records is reissuing the band’s catalogue (save for 1972’s swan song, Mardi Gras, recorded without guitarist Tom Fogerty), with insightful liner-note essays by the likes of Robert Christgau and Ben Fong-Torres, and a handful of (mostly) live bonus tracks per disc. But the relative lack of extra material speaks to both CCR’s staggeringly prolific work ethic (six albums in less than three years), and the fact that they rarely recorded a song not worth releasing.

Their 1968 self-titled debut and its follow-up Bayou Country find CCR perfecting their swamp-rock groove (reshaping the former’s “Suzie Q” cover into the latter’s “Born on the Bayou”), before Green River and Willie and the Poorboys boiled it down into two-minute hot shots (“Green River,” “Fortunate Son”). But it’s 1970’s Cosmo’s Factory that stands as the most enduring testament to CCR’s greatness: the ceaseless process of singles (“Up Around the Bend,” “Lookin’ Out My Backdoor,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain”) practically makes it a greatest-hits album in its own right, and the opening seven-minute gospel thrasher “Ramble Tamble” could be the most fiery performance Fogerty ever laid to tape.

Following that triumph, the band could be forgiven for having nothing left for 1970’s Pendulum, but while the album’s singles (“Hey Tonight,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain”) are not among CCR’s best, sweat-soaked soul workouts like “Pagan Baby” and “Sailor’s Lament” show there was still some fight left in ‘em. And the Pendulum disc boasts one of the few genuine rarities these reissues have to offer: the two-part “45 Revolutions Per Minute,” a Zappa-esque tape-collage experiment that plays less like a bid for avant-garde cred than a soundtrack to CCR’s impending collapse. STUART BERMAN

HANK WILLIAMS *****
The Unreleased Recordings (3 CD Box Set)
Time/Life
This is a superb collection of 54 songs that Hank Williams and his band recorded live-to-tape for a 15-minute, early morning radio show on WSM 650 in Nashville, sponsored by Mother’s Best Flour. Although Williams is best known as a singer of his own brilliant, timeless material, almost all of these songs are covers, revealing his equally tremendous skills as an interpreter, and the kind of music that shaped him. But the real revelation here is how much of that music is religious in nature, from Southern gospel hymns to cautionary tales, inspirational examples and evangelical singalongs. Most are delivered with the multi-part harmonies of Williams’ excellent bandmates —a rarity on his studio recordings. All told, it’s an essential document of an American music icon. HOWARD DRUCKMAN

THE FIRESIGN THEATRE ****
Box of Danger: The Complete Nick Danger Casebook
Shout! Factory
The most famous character created (or rather, adapted) by seminal California comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre is superficially a parody of noirish gumshoe yarns, but this four-disc box set demonstrates that Nick Danger’s misadventures owed much to some distinctly softboiled Brits. Their “third eye’s” radio travails began in the late ’60s, and the influence of fashionable foreigners like The Goon Show is obvious: absurdist verbal humour, anarchic meta jokes and a predilection for (vocal) drag all show up frequently, refracted through an American prism that probably involved getting stoned and listening to Frank Zappa a lot. A generous range of material is spread across these four discs: some sketches were taped live or even bootlegged, and the whole thing spans four decades, allowing for contextual comparison. The ethnic caricatures in some of their early routines make for uncomfortable hilarity, but despite its datedness, the group’s scathing satire still feels more contemporary now than the Theatre’s actual recent performances. Still, with referential and punning character names like Otis Starsucker and Van Pederatzy, they could always try and beat Thomas Pynchon to the Nobel Prize. CHRIS RANDLE

THOR ***
Keep the Dogs Away: 30th Anniversary Edition
Scratch
Pretty much alone on the short list of rockers who were bodybuilding champs, Jon Mikl Thor was a hero among girlie men when his band first galumphed out of Vancouver in 1978. The god of thunder’s shtick may have calcified by the ’80s (and he’s still flexing those muscles today) but his first album remains a compulsively listenable glam oddity and very nearly the lost CanRock classic that many claim it to be. Shades of the Sweet, Alice Cooper circa Love It to Death and early KISS predominate but there’s something novel about the combination of multi-tracked vocals, massed guitars and cartoonish humour, especially when it comes to the proto-“Stonehenge” stomp of “Thunder” and the weird cod-Transformer balladry of “Catch a Tiger.” Many songs’ new-wave–appropriate poppiness makes Thor unlikely kin to hometown faves like The Pointed Sticks and The Modernettes. “Rosie” pretty much approximates what AC/DC would’ve sounded like if Bon Scott had been replaced with Fred Schneider, which in hindsight would have been a very good idea. JASON ANDERSON