Tonight C&L welcomes a new Music Club contributor to the site: SmashyD is the blogger behind Smashin' Transistors, and the music podcaster at the same name. When not informing visitors of the things that the coastline of Michigan’s thumb has to offer or keeping a small town college radio station actually interesting and unusual, factoid hungry SmashyD is making sure his two young adult sons' bullcrap detectors are always in working order.
We're so glad to have him here. -- eds.
When New Order broke up for a 2nd time in 2007 most thought it would be final. The scathing comments that the former bandmates were making about each other in interviews (mostly between bassist Peter Hook and singer/guitarist Bernard Sumner) made no secret that the two people most fans considered the driving forces of the band would never work together again.
In 2011, New Order announced they would be playing their first live shows since 2006. The word was original members Sumner, drummer Stephen Morris and keyboardist Gillian Gilbert (who had been absent from the band since 2001) would be in the group. There was no mention of Hook being back in the line up. Several rumors went around as to why he wouldn't be. One camp claims he was asked but refused and another claims that he was never contacted. The band released the album Live at the London Troxy in late 2011 and played a handful of shows though 2012 and '14.
In September of this year New Order released Music Complete, their first full album of new material in close to a decade. "Restless" is the first single from it. The album has received good reviews for being fresh and new sounding while still retaining the classic New order sound in avatar or cool publications like Consequence Of Sound.
What are you listening to this evening?
