New Order have every right to milk their singular, stunning sound for as long as they want, but with the release of this redundant box set, the live and hits compilations in their discography now outnumber their albums. Not even the Rolling Stones are guilty of that. Inexplicably sequenced by a handful of UK press and music celebrities, Retro is a blind pass through a catalog that contains dozens of masterpieces-- and more importantly, in terms of value, rarities-- not included on these four (five, in the limited edition) discs.

Their legendary, late manager Rob Gretton had the idea to assemble a New Order box set as comprehensive as Heart and Soul, Joy Division's complete 20th anniversary compendium. His collection would have been a spotter's dream: Recycle was to compile every version of every single the band ever released, as well as all of their non-album tracks. Such a package would span more than a dozen compact discs, and with royalties and copyrights spread all over the world or thinly defined, it was a financial impossibility. But the project could not die with Gretton, and rather than bore themselves with another inevitably incomplete assortment of hits, the band opted to punt, inviting a pair of relatively recent journalistic acquaintances and two long-time musical compatriots to pick their favorite tracks from four areas of New Order's career: singles, album cuts, remixes and live recordings.

Delightful author, journalist and sometime TV presenter Miranda Sawyer selected the tracks for disc one, subtitled "Pop". Sawyer just recently contributed insightful audio commentary to the UK edition of the 24 Hour Party People DVD; though a literate and witty fan, she for some reason chose the rancid, demo-quality original recording of "Temptation" from the 1982 FAC63 12". Incredibly, the lush, world-famous version from May 1987, spun for dance floors ever since, doesn't appear anywhere on Retro.

If Sawyer's aim was to expose a rare track, why didn't she include the exceedingly uncommon, original version of "Ceremony", rather than the 12" remix available on Substance? As with many of the older, previously released tracks on discs one and two, "Ceremony" is poorly mastered compared to its prior edition, saddled by clipping and a digitally compressed, flattened low-end; sonic depth is sadly sacrificed for the sake of volume normalization and increased presence. Not that New Order gives a shit: in the liner notes for Retro, they run down most of their early hits, tired of hearing and performing them. Sumner goes so far as to say that "Blue Monday" isn't really a song, rather "an experiment in technology."

"Pop" is an altogether confusing posit. Untested recent tracks like "Brutal", the ridiculously titled Oasis facsimile "Slow Jam", and "Everyone Everywhere", a lesser sibling to "Ruined in a Day" (both from Republic) are meant to compete with New Order's experimental classics "True Faith", "Blue Monday" and "Bizarre Love Triangle" (all presented in their original versions). Even "Regret"-- their last true masterpiece and Bernard Sumner's favorite in their catalog-- wipes away any memory of these tepid tunes, which amount to New Order doing New Order.

2001's egregious Cure knock-off "Crystal" appears in its wholly unnecessary, seven-minute album form (the single mix was short enough that few people noticed it's just a dance remix of "A Forest"), yet Sawyer opts for the butchered four-minute edit of "The Perfect Kiss", an epic that requires every second of its original eight minutes to build up and breakdown. If you're wondering which version of the endlessly remixed "Confusion" turns up, well, all I can tell you is: "Ra-ta-ta-tatatata-ta-HEY!" Yes, what Arthur Baker did for the song was remarkable in 1983, but it's tedious and incongruous with the rest of this disc, another example of poor judgment from a fan with her heart in the right place.

John McCready makes an odd choice as a representative for all New Order fans. His passage for the Retro liner notes reveals how he hated the band, judging them against his unwavering worship of Joy Division's first album, Unknown Pleasures. By his own admission, he ignored or loathed most of the band's work up until the very late 80s, when he accosted Rob Gretton in The Nightclub New Order Built, Tony Wilson's Hacienda. Only in his embarrassment did he delve into their catalog, and now, barely ten years later, McCready intends to condense New Order's hidden, jealously guarded trove of superior album tracks to just one disc.

His selections are shockingly astute, culling often overlooked, superlative cuts like "Leave Me Alone" from Power, Corruption & Lies, and "All Day Long", the heavenly, explosive cornerstone of the band's inexplicably dismissed, excellent 1986 album Brotherhood. "Cries and Whispers", mislabeled "Mesh" on every New Order release up to this point, is the only song sonically improved for Retro, and another fine choice. I won't fault McCready for excluding "As It Was When It Was", New Order's first real break with their established early-to-mid 80s sound, and one of their best-ever anthems. It was always better in concert, and its finest-ever version turns up on Retro's live disc. But to opt for the dumb-drunk throwaway "Every Little Counts" and the most boring song on Low-Life ("Sunrise"), ignoring the hilarious, fuck-you grin of "Face Up" is a major mistake. What's worse, he purports a laughable dare by including "Run Wild" from Get Ready, a slight sonic autopsy of New Order's sound done as Give Out But Don't Give Up-era Primal Scream. It's cute and fun, but this is supposed to be for fans, John: give us a curiosity, like the three-minute edit of "Temptation" from the Something Wild soundtrack. I'd take "Thieves Like Us"-- which doesn't appear on Retro in any form-- in place of a handful of McCready's picks. Still, his "Fan" disc is easily the best in the set, as this $50-$60 box plummets into irrelevance during its remix and live compilations.

Hacienda DJ Mike Pickering weighs in on the third disc, "Club", an exhausting and exhausted collection of extended dance mixes that, but for Shep Pettibone's superb arrangement of "Bizarre Love Triangle" (where's his "True Faith" mix from Bright Lights Big City, Mike?), is a drink coaster. I suppose anyone that actually likes "Shellshock" will enjoy the insufferable John Robie's treatment, as it's a huge improvement over the dull Substance version, but this part of the set fails on all levels to inspire dancing or even pleasure.

For whatever reason, New Order's music is always sacrificed to the trendiest DJs and producers, whose remixes invariably date the band's material. For Arthur Baker's legacy of production genius, which broke New Order in America, his career's been over for fifteen years, and his 1995 take on "1963" only emphasizes why. Many of these selections are barely modified extended or instrumental mixes of the source material, except of course, for the classic "Blue Monday", which is murdered in a four-on-the-floor gabba blasphemy.

Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie put together the fourth disc of live performances, and god knows how many hours of tape he had to listen to in the process. Gillespie was a member of Glaswegian New Order impersonators The Wake, who were offered a helping hand by their heroes and ultimately signed to Factory. He never forgot their generosity, and has always considered them one of Britain's best live acts; he's right, but concert recordings are not the same as a concert, and fail to capture the stupefying "how are they doing all of this live?" sensation New Order always delivered from the stage.

This disc does offer two brutal insights, however: the 1981 Glastonbury performance of "In a Lonely Place", a gut-wrenching funeral for Ian Curtis, and two songs from what was intended to be the last performance of their career. "Regret" and "As It Was When It Was" are from New Order's legendary farewell appearance at the August 1993 Reading Festival. Three weeks earlier, I saw their American farewell at Great Woods in Mansfield, Massachusetts; after the last line of "World"-- "How long will it last?"-- Bernard Sumner immediately blurted "too fucking long..." into the microphone, pretty much killing the mood for the rest of the show. That American tour was brutal, low-lighted by a sweltering 115-degree performance in Dallas, and the band were at each other's throats from the beginning. The Reading performance, which I've since picked up on bootleg, is a glorious counterpoint to the awkward finale I'd endured; I felt like someone I'd lost touch with had gone on to accomplish something remarkable since I'd last seen them. It was a moving and proud rejoinder to the band's embarrassing dejection just days earlier.

Sadly, New Order's exhilarating, sequenced pop only works live thanks to its deafening volume; reduced to home stereos-- or worse, headphones-- few of these selections convey energy beyond the studio recordings they're bound to. The early tapes of "Ceremony" and "Procession" are raging-- and surprisingly, Bernard's ebullient, lunatic screams during the 2002 Big Day Out raise "Crystal" through the roof, obliterating the studio version with its abandon-- but classics like "Temptation", "Fine Time" and "The Perfect Kiss" suffer from poor mixes and sterile regurgitation of pre-programmed beats. Still, for diehard New Order fans, the version of "Crystal" on "Live" is a singular enticement.

Ever rewarding spotters with b-sides and limited editions, New Order prepared a limited edition version of Retro featuring a catchall fifth disc of rarities (there they are!). Anchored by the elusive 18-minute version of "Elegia" (from Low-Life and Pretty in Pink), the un-subtitled set includes the famed 1998 re-recording of "Temptation", the first thing the band did after reuniting. It offers nothing new outside of some feedback and strings, definitely a fans-only curiosity in that it captures the band's rebirth. A live version of the Joy Division classic "Transmission", also from the 2002 Big Day Out Festival, is a pure crowd-pleaser, but really nothing worth preserving for eternity; you can't say New Order could do injustice to a song they wrote, but with Bernard's lesser vocal capacity, this is a private moment, one you had to witness to appreciate.

The greatest goodies on this bonus disc are a version of "The Perfect Kiss" recorded live during the Jonathan Demme video shoot-- only available on an extremely rare promotional 12" from 1985-- and a stupendous new song, "Such a Good Thing". How New Order managed this light-hearted pop gem is beyond me, as are their reasons for sticking it on a limited edition slipcase appended to a $50 box set. At any rate, "Such a Good Thing" is a return to the straight-ahead pop of "Regret" and Low-Life, a celebration of the band's more wistful, carefree sensibility, and another reason serious fans will want to save up for this set, no matter how ultimately unsatisfying they'll find the majority of its selections.

-Chris Ott, January 24th, 2003