Eloquent awkwardness

Electronic music has an eternal problem: It sounds like it's been made on machines.

If you're a fan, its capacity to create sounds that have never been heard before and beats that transcend human abilities tends to make up for that.

But every so often, an artist comes along who tries to beat electronic music's man-versus-machine nature and uses technology to make its music sound more human than any acoustic set ever could. One of the all-time most successful winners of this war is electronic-dance group New Order, with its 1983 album Power, Corruption & Lies.

The famous cover of Power, Corruption & Lies, a revamping of a French Romantic flower basket painting that contrasts with some incoherent colored blocks in the top-right corner, establishes the album's odd contradictions just by looking at it.

But in case you overlooked the strangely haunting cover, the high bass-line melody that opens the album on "Age of Consent" brings New Order's enigma into focus. The bass line feels awkward and alienating, not unlike the queasy attraction of liking someone slightly out of your league. It feeds into lead singer Bernard Sumner's pubescent-sounding voice.

He doesn't want to talk about what's wrong; he doesn't care about the relationship he just gave up on and he's come to accept what's happened. It sounds like a list of reasons for not writing a song, except that when he puts them together, they contradict and confound, creating a lyrical puzzle. As it turns out, he's in the mental turmoil of knowing what the right thing is to do and not being able to do it. It's not your standard club-music lyrical fare.

But then, neither is the ethereal synthesizer solo -- still one of the most beautiful ever recorded -- that follows those lyrics. The combination "Age of Consent" sets up is New Order's calling card -- innovative instrumentals just off-putting enough to be desirable, enigmatic lyrics that make you think and lush synth lines that fill in the gaps of thought where vocals and traditional instruments can't.

Power, Corruption & Lies' main theme is immaturity -- ironic considering its weight -- or at least, immaturity as the world would define it. More specifically, it's about exploring the difference between being mature enough to know what the world wants from you and being too immature or resistant to do it.

Even at its most immature moments, though, the album never comes off as annoying. Its most defining lyric comes at the end of "Your Silent Face," in which Sumner sings almost in a whisper, "You've caught me at a bad time / So why don't you piss off?" It could have easily come off as juvenile whining, but surrounded by the majestic, introspective synth and slight but hooky guitar and bass, it becomes eloquent as well as funny.

New Order constantly makes the awkward flaws of youth eloquent. In "The Village," Sumner sings, "Our love is like the flowers, the rain the sea and the hours ... Oh, our love is like the Earth, the Sun, the trees and the birth."

It's so corny it's almost creepy, but sung with confused passion, backed by endearing sequencer patterns and that high bass, its innocent frustration makes it hard not to love.

The closer "Leave Me Alone" wraps up the album in a typical New Order album-ending fashion -- that is, with the least memorable song. In yet another contradiction, this makes the song memorable because you spend time dwelling on why the band could possibly think that was a good closing song. It drones on with a simple beat, repetitive guitar line and rhyming lyrics, which feature lines such as, "From my head to my toes / To my teeth to my nose / You get these words wrong ... Leave me alone."

In other words, the last lines of the album insult the listener and tell them to go away. It is, of course, a brilliant strategy to make them listen again. Power, Corruption & Lies gives in to the imperfections of being a living human and turns them in on themselves.