The question, by the way, wasn’t “should a New Order album be #1 on my list,” but “which New Order album should be #1 on my list?”

At various times in my life, Republic and Brotherhood have both held down the top spot. Even now, they would both easily be in a top 10 list where I wasn’t following the one album per band rule. Monaco’s Music for Pleasure would be as well (I thought using solo projects was cheating), and Low-life, an album that saw me through some tough times during my sophomore year of college, would at very least be in the top 15. Both albums by The Other Two rank pretty highly on my list too. (I think Superhighways is the better of the two, but I’m willing to hear arguments to the contrary.)

There’s a case to be made, I think, that New Order had the best five-album stretch of any band, from Power, Corruption & Lies through to Republic. This doesn’t even count the album’s worth of tracks that only appeared on singles that they released during that time, which includes some of their finest work. (If you can believe this, “True Faith,” “1963,” “Temptation,” “Confusion,” “Shellshock,” “Let’s Go (Nothing for Me),” “Touched by the Hand of God,” and “State of the Nation” all were non-LP tracks — and that’s without even noting that “Blue Monday” didn’t appear on the original UK version of PC&L, and was only added to American pressings of the album.)

But out of all these high points, Technique is quite possibly the band’s finest hour. From the flickering hi-hat that starts off “Fine Time” to the edgy, circular guitar solo that closes out “Dream Attack,” it’s a flat-out, stone-cold masterpiece. New Order were the founding fathers — and mother — of dance-rock, of course, but Technique is where they reached the pinnacle of this fusion. The guitars and synths don’t just compliment each other, they sound almost like two aspects of the same thing. The songs on the album range from the largely guitar-driven (”Run,” “All the Way”) to the almost completely synthesized (”Vanishing Point”), but they sound all of a piece. It’s not a matter of switching from one style to another, it’s that they’ve so thoroughly perfected the style that they can change the instrumentation to fit each song without worrying about how well it will come together.

But that’s not a talent that would matter if the songs weren’t utterly, gorgeously, heartbreakingly brilliant, which they are, without exception. What might possibly be my favorite song ever, by anyone, is on Technique: the pulsating centerpiece “Mr. Disco,” which somehow takes an entire lifetime of unrequited longing and turns it into four and a half minutes on the dance floor. Even now, almost a decade after I first heard it, my heart still breaks a little every time it gets to the end and Bernard Sumner whispers “Ibiza, Majorca, and Benidorm too: / I searched all these places, but never found you.”

And aside from all the musical genius at work here, it’s that emotional honesty that makes Technique not merely special, but priceless. Plenty of other bands, some of whom I like as far as they go, have tried to imitate New Order’s sound, but what The Killers and The Bravery and Interpol and iForward, Russia! have never seemed to realize is that the essence of New Order isn’t in the sinuous basslines or syndrums, it’s in the ache and the longing and the bruised hope that forms the heart of their songs.

“Nothing in this world can touch the music that I heard / When I woke up this morning,” Sumner sings quietly at the beginning of “Dream Attack.” “It put the sun into my life / It cut my heartbeat with a knife…” And you know what? Nothing in this world — or at least in my world — can touch Technique, which is likely to remain my favorite album for the foreseeable future. (Or at least until the next time that Brotherhood or Republic make their way onto my stereo…)

Release date: 1989
Label: Qwest
Rating: 10/10

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