Album Review: New Order's Low-life

New Order’s third album Low-life is their most evenly brilliant effort to date. While Power, Corruption and Lies featured extraordinary highlights such as “Age of Consent”, “586”, “The Village” and “Your Silent Face” it also suffers from containing New Order’s only virtually unlistenable song “We All Stand”. 

Low-life, by contrast, features solid techno-rock from beginning to end. The album is also notorious for it covers, which features album-sized, distorted, black & white visages of the band members. Like many things connected with New Order albums, this is a sort of inside joke.

New Order’s first two albums, as well as their two albums when they were known as Joy Division before the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis, were legendary for the lack of information. No lyric sheet, no linter note, not even much in the way of letting consumers know who had recorded it. New Order is the most consistently anti-commercial band of all time—much more so than the more celebrated Nirvana.