New Order
Substance ’87 [2023 Reissue]
WARNER
Because I’m some kind of maniac, I recently set out to listen to every entry on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. I had no misplaced faith in the house that Jann Wenner built, but in 2019, when I was still new to writing about music, it made for a structured—if flawed—syllabus on one interpretation of the canon. I expected questionable picks going in, but not so many overlong (and just as often out-of-print) compilations—obvious excuses to crowbar artists who aren’t known for their LPs into the ranking. I’m just a humble maniac, and I mean no offense to Merle Haggard’s Down Every Road, but how does a four-disc career retrospective count as an album?
Enter New Order’s Substance 1987 at number #363: a compilation in the shape of an album that earns its place among the greatest of all time. Originally released in the titular year by Factory Records, it collects every non-album single from the Manchester dance rockers’ first seven years, with a couple of them re-recorded in order to smooth out the tracklist (that means essential standalones like “Temptation,” plus the extended 12-inch mixes of the singles from their best albums, Low-Life and Brotherhood). In the original run, the CD version came with a second disc for B-sides, but the more concise vinyl edition consisted of just the 12 A-sides on two LPs—a bulletproof double album of brooding, clanging post-punk and post-disco grooves.
As well as it flows, though, that 75-minute cut also does what only a compilation can: documenting New Order’s arc as they perfected their fusion of post-Joy-Division English melancholy and New York club music ecstasy. It starts with a nervous three-note riff on “Ceremony” and rises to the vocoded oxytocin rush and withdrawal of “Bizarre Love Triangle,” with “True Faith” as the ultimate synth-pop comedown. That arc also bridges the decades before and after Substance; New Order tapped into the medium of the dance remix as an extension of the neverending rhythm that powered their krautrock forefathers while prefiguring the ’90s vision—however brief—of electronica as the future of rock.
Since then, the band’s biggest hits have aged considerably (no matter what Noel Gallagher says). Can you think of anything more definitionally ’80s than the raw, squeaky sequencers of “Blue Monday”? Or the indulgent melodrama of “Shellshock”? Still, Substance hit hard in 2020, when I finally pulled its number on the Rolling Stone list. In paranoid isolation, I took comfort in Bernard Sumner’s mumbling ambivalence toward staying in and going out. Even better: Through Substance I could access the kinetic drive of dance music without forcing myself into a good mood. I learned to appreciate a drum machine as a kind of pacemaker; you can always count on one to keep a pulse, even when your heart isn’t in it. I’m not saying New Order saved my life, but a lot of days they at least did my dishes.
Aside from chasing down out-of-print CDs, the most arduous part of my ill-advised (and still unfinished) album list adventure was shoveling through deluxe packages like New Order’s own Low-Life Definitive Edition from earlier this year. Substance 2023 expands the CD version into a four-disc set, with one disc for rarities and one for a spirited live show from 1987 (though the audio quality isn’t great, and the arrangements haven’t yet bloomed into the killer live cuts on 2017’s NOMC15). Thankfully, the vinyl edition is a no-strings-attached remaster of Substance in its ideal double-LP form—which, per Discogs, hasn’t been officially issued in the US since its original run. That alone deserves pomp. And, well, ceremony.
