Power, Corruption & Lies

Eight tracks in about forty-three minutes, and the test finds most of them required. Age of Consent must open: a high bass line carrying the melody announces the record’s sound before a word is sung. Your Silent Face is the centre and could not go. Leave Me Alone is the required end, the guitar band returning after the machines. The Village and 5 8 6 carry the turn to the sequencer that the record is about. The test bites at Ecstasy, a sequenced groove with little voice and little development, and at We All Stand, whose length is permitted rather than compelled; 5 8 6 runs its introduction longer than the argument needs.

Score: 8.2 / 10

What the record brings into the open can be named: feeling survives inside mechanism, and a grief that will not be spoken can be carried by a pulse. The band had lost its singer two and a half years before, and the record never says so. It says it by sound: a small human voice and a melodic bass held inside the sequencer’s regularity, warmth found where coldness was expected. That is disclosure through sound, credited as fully as words, and it holds across the record. What holds it below the bar is the kind of thing disclosed. It stays a condition of feeling rather than an articulated meaning, and the words, oblique by design, state little beyond the persistence of feeling itself.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Elevation comes in one temperature, a cool, melancholy lift, and it comes several times. Your Silent Face is the summit: a slow, stately sequence in the manner of Kraftwerk, melodica over synthesiser chords, a melody of real grandeur. Age of Consent lifts on the bass and the chiming guitar into a rush of longing. Leave Me Alone ends the record on a height of sorrow, chiming and plain. 5 8 6 builds from an ambient introduction to a dance pulse with some exhilaration. The Village is bright rather than high, We All Stand dusk without a rise, Ultraviolence tension, and Ecstasy motion without height. Four of eight rise, and none reaches terror or sustained grandeur.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Little is built and some is evoked, and the frame carries most of it. The sleeve sets a nineteenth-century still life of roses, beauty and its passing, beside a title of power, corruption and lies that the record leaves unspoken: a coded accusation next to a memento. The Village evokes the pastoral, and Leave Me Alone the solitary who asks to be left. One pattern comes near construction: the survivors’ passage, mourning turned by the machine into motion, carried by the order from played song into sequence and back. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is that the record has no figures and no story, its words build no pattern, and the particular is withheld throughout.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The inheritance is Joy Division, the band’s own first life, and Movement (1981), the record of mourning that still stood in that shadow; beside it, Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder’s sequenced disco and the electro of New York. The turn is large. A post-punk guitar band whose identity was made in gloom joins programmed sequencers and the dance floor to its own playing, and a guitarist who had not wanted to sing becomes the voice, plain and unprotected. The stake was the band’s standing, its audience and an inheritance that many in that audience held sacred. The path had been opened by Kraftwerk and Moroder and by the band’s own singles; this is the first album to stand wholly on the new ground.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. Its knowledge is the meeting of the hand and the machine, and its form enacts the meeting: drum machine and live drums together, sequences under a bass that plays melody, a voice placed small and close inside the pattern. Played by the band alone, these songs would be post-punk; played by the machines alone, they would lose the warmth that is their finding. The sequence is counted here, once: from played songs into sequences, through their meeting, and back to the guitar band at the end. The alternation is a balance more than an argument, and two tracks would say the same in another shape.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence over forty-three years, and most of it formal. Musicians and producers return to the record for the way it joins programmed and played parts, for the bass as lead instrument, and for its sound, which has been taken apart and copied. Its place in the band’s history has kept it under study, and the sleeve, with its colour code, has a long life of its own in design. On return the layering separates: the counter-melodies of bass and keyboard, a live hi-hat set against the machine. The semantic yield is thin. The words were not built to carry much and do not renew, and part of the depth listeners find is projection invited by withheld statement and by the band’s history.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The field is the post-punk and new-wave album of the early 1980s, and the meeting of the rock band with electronic dance music. The intrinsic force: the record showed that a guitar band could join sequencers and dance rhythm to its own playing and keep its melancholy, rather than becoming a synthesiser act, and in Your Silent Face and Age of Consent it made two templates of that joining. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the fusion of indie rock and dance that ran through the next decade in Britain is commonly traced to this band, and this record is often cited as the point where it found its manner. Much of that reach travels through the singles, which are not on the record.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-three years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, kept in print and remastered, and later editions that add material are not the object. Presence is continuous but charged. The album is heard and placed high whenever its decade is counted, yet its presence is narrower than its band’s: Blue Monday, which is not on it, is far better known, and much of the album’s presence is among musicians, critics and the band’s followers. The fabric bears its year more than most: drum machines, sequenced synthesiser tones and sampled strings and choirs are heard as period sounds, though the playing and the melancholy carry over.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing in part. Hook’s bass, high and melodic, is a lead voice and the record’s signature. Programmed sequences and Morris’s live drums are joined with judgement, each heard against the other; the sequences of 5 8 6 and Your Silent Face are built with patience; Gilbert’s keyboards colour without crowding. The band produced itself, and the sound is clear and spacious in most places. The faults fall across a large share: Sumner’s singing is thin and unsteady in pitch throughout, which may be meant as plainness but limits what the voice can carry; some mixes are thin, We All Stand and Ecstasy among them.

Score: 8.1 / 10

One law governs the record: feeling carried inside a regular pulse, the human held within the machine, under a cool and melancholy light. The two most distant elements obey it. We All Stand, slow, dubbed and played, and Ecstasy, fast, sequenced and nearly wordless, are the same arrangement of a small human sound against a larger regularity, once as drift and once as motion. Leave Me Alone, the most purely a band song, keeps the law by its chiming regularity. The range of form runs from guitar song to electro to processional. The Village’s brightness strains the law a little, and the range of tone is narrow, nearly all melancholy and cool; narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, as mood: longing, solitude, the wish to be left. The machine is the medium itself, and its meeting with the body is the record’s matter, the body heard as dance. The natural order is a glimpse in The Village and in the sleeve’s roses, and grief is held without being named. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: the title names power and corruption, and the record does not hold them; the state, history, labour, the family and the sacred are absent. The orders held are few and close together, and they are held by sound rather than placed in a life or a world.

Score: 6.7 / 10