New Order dusts off pieces of its past at Coachella festINDIO, Calif. -- "We're going to do it. We're going to play some Joy Division songs," singer-guitarist Bernard Sumner revealed a few days before New Order helped close the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on Sunday.
"It's been 25 years since Ian [Curtis] died and we want to do something in his honor," he said. New Order had avoided playing songs by Joy Division for two decades, in part because it was a tragedy--the suicide of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis--that forced Sumner and the band's other surviving members, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris, to carry on as New Order.
But as the 25th anniversary of Curtis' death on May 18, 1980, approaches, his old bandmates decided it was time last weekend to acknowledge their past. The performance was a prelude to the legendary band's first Chicago concert in more than a decade--on Tuesday at the Aragon.
Morris' tom drums thundered on "Love Will Tear Us Apart," and the voices of Hook and Sumner rose to a fevered pitch as they commanded, "Dance, dance, dance to the radio" on a spectacular "Transmission." These Joy Division staples were received like lost national anthems by an audience of more than 40,000--and why not?
The influence of New Order and Joy Division has never been more apparent, their merger of rock guitars, icy keyboard textures and electronic dance music a template for countless bands who played the two-day festival, including the Bravery, Kasabian, and Sunday headliner Nine Inch Nails. In its sixth year, Coachella has reaffirmed its claim to be North America's most prestigious rock concert, a legitimate answer to massive European festivals such as Glastonbury and Reading.
But on Sunday, New Order sounded less engaged performing its own material. And the momentum sagged when it played several songs in a row from its latest album, "Waiting for the Sirens' Call." But Hook's indelible bass riff on "Blue Monday" brought the set to a close in high style.
Gang of Four's original lineup, playing its first North American show in more than 20 years, suffered no such letdown. Though the entire set was drawn from songs released in 1979-81, the Four still sounded ahead of their time--godfathers of an angular postpunk sound that has spawned Coachella bands such as Bloc Party, Futureheads and Radio 4.
The key was Andy Gill's still profoundly innovative guitar playing, in which sustain, silence, dissonance and rhythmic tension conspired to elevate songs such as "Anthrax" and "Damaged Goods."
Still, there was plenty of new music that forged its own path. The Perceptionists reaffirmed their standing as one of hip-hop's finest live acts with a performance that managed to be vulnerable ("Love Letter") and darkly humorous ("Career Finders") as well as politically sharp ("Black Dialogue"). Fiery Furnaces turned songs from their two albums into a 50-minute progressive-pop suite that owed more to the linguistic acrobatics of Gilbert and Sullivan and the wicked twists and turns of Carl Stalling's cartoon music than it did to Yes or Emerson Lake and Palmer.
And the Arcade Fire made like a Salvation Army band rocking a wake, complete with black suits and dresses, as it reprised the songs from its 2004 indie-rock breakthrough album "Funeral." The coed nine-piece band played with an exuberance bordering on giddiness, as the songs kept surging past their low-fi recorded versions.
Later, Nine Inch Nails would turn despair and death into a festival of screams and tortured whispers. It was sexy, self-indulgent and bombastic.
The Arcade Fire doesn't know how to be any of those things (yet), but it put its stamp on Coachella '05 anyway. Its gloriously ramshackle sound carried the day.
Quelle: Greg Kot,
Chicago Tribune
