The fun part of these Tidal catalogs is that they are living documents. As new official records get released, I will go ahead and update them moving forward so that it always stays current. You can reference the original post, here.
New Order released a new live album recent and the title would be a total mouthful if I had any clue what to call it… ∑(No,12k,Lg,17Mif).
Weirdly enough, if you look back to my original post, you’ll see that I really didn’t like the catalog at all, not even enough to write it up. Weirdly enough, I actually do like this disc. It’s a really enjoyable upbeat live recording, full of energy that I personally, didn’t find on the studio records. If I were to go back to New Order, I’d listen to this again.
Introduction: For those of you that have stumbled across this website and are interested in reading about my trek through the universe of the Tidal streaming service, let me tell you a bit about what I did. Back in 2016 I thought it would be kind of cool to listen to an artist’s catalog from start to finish and rank the albums from best to worst. After all, who doesn’t like a good list? I thought I might do a few of them and see what happened, hoping it would introduce me to records that were foreign to me in the arsenal of an artist I was familiar with. I also though that it would be pretty cool to get out of the “one off” mode of listening to a new record, years after the previous one, in order to get a true sense of how the artist matured over time. Flash forward to June of 2019 and 250 catalogs later, I have ended the trek. I posted these all on Facebook over the years as they were completed but I’m going to move them all over here, starting with #1, in order to expand (“remaster”) them out a bit more.
As with all my catalogs, to be considered in the ranking, an album has to meet certain criteria:
The artist must actually perform on 80% of the tracks (soundtrack and rap provision)
No compilations of previous released material will be included.
The
album must have been released officially and within the realm of the
label that the artist would have been on at the time or official
releases posthumously (normally applies to a slew of live records)
Any EPs must contain new new music and be relevant to the catalog, not be more like a single with a b-side or two.
Compilations
of previously recorded material will be included if they are remixes,
bonus tracks, outtakes… mostly music that hasn’t been part of a main
release before)
DVD releases are not considered.
Entrance Point: “Blue Monday” “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “True Faith” – nothing else. Over the years, I had heard how great New Order was but never listened to them. I’m not sure why I decided to go to New Order this early in the series though other than the fact that I wanted to do a catalog of an artist I actually wasn’t that familiar with.
Included: Substance. As mentioned in the intro, I don’t include compilations because that really isn’t fair to put an album of hits up against standard studio recordings. But this one is a bit different as I’ll get into below.
Not included: Strange Fruit releases, which was John Peel’s label to release mainly Peel Sessions. Eh, not really considering them part of the official catalog.
All albums ranked on a 10 point scale.
I’m not going to bother “remastering” this one at all. My original posts were one paragraph and just a list and I didn’t get into writing quite a bit about them until later on. All I put for this one originally was: Finished listening to the New Order catalog on Tidal. Overrated, is my word for them. Yes, some great songs but no must listen album. But this isn’t what I listen to these days – so that probably has an influence on that statement.
I’m not going to waste time expanding this one out as it’s one of a handful that I really just don’t have many words on. I just really didn’t like the catalog much at all. It was painful for me to even give 9’s out to two records but I do try to listen to albums objectively and I recognize that the best ones deserved a high rank.
The Trusty Steed 