Taking Sides: NEW ORDER VS RUSH?

I like how Rush is the secret catalyst for a New Order vs the Cure discussion

I enjoy Copeland's high tuned snare sound, particularly on Synchronicity, and rate him very highly as a drummer. I think Peart has the edge in terms of feel and technical skill, though. People like to talk about Peart's drumming in terms of cold, calculated technique, but there's a lot of feel in his drumming, a thing which people don't pay attention to because they're marvelling at the technique.

reading this thread from the top down, i got to this treeship post, and i'm just gonna stop there, because it's perfect:

i voted for new order but i wonder if i'd be happier if i was the kind of person who'd choose rush
― Trϵϵship, Monday, April 22, 2019 10:36 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I genuinely do not think the Cure "do new order" at all, ever. "The Walk" vs. "Blue Monday" is an interesting contrast for minor-key Oberheim-driven floor bangers of the 80s,I'll admit, but "Blue Monday" filled that floor -- the Cure was always more divisive, at least on the SoCal & PDX dance floors where I stepped to both songs when they were new. I mean we can disagree about this, that's fine, but I have in fact "listen[ed] to the records" -- they are not similar. The synth on "The Walk" sounds like something off a Goblin record. I'll own that these two share more space than most Cure & New Order tunes do, it does seem that Smith & Tolhurst were getting curious about what was up with dance 12"s & all that before they rediscovered acid, whereupon they do "The Top" -- a move New Order couldn't imagine in their most E-driven fantasies.

Turrican, I've liked you on many threads, often concluding that your detractors take you too seriously, but you're exhibiting your worst traits here.

How long before Alfred joins the ever growing legion of detractors? Poll maybe?

Let's talk instead about how 'The Walk' is a better version of 'Blue Monday' ...

It's a matter of taste, but if you don't have any knowledge of or appreciation for electronic music or dance music and are a boiled-beef-and-carrots rock fan then I can imagine holding this opinion.

To say that there are no similarities between 'The Walk' and 'Blue Monday' is a hell of a stretch!

Did anyone say there were no similarities?

How long before Tom D knocks off his obsession with me? 🤔

Did anyone say there were no similarities?

― Freddie Starr (Hitler in shorts) (Tom D.), Tuesday, April 23, 2019 3:01 PM (forty-five seconds ago) Bookmark Flag PostPermalink

They did, as it happens!

(xp) until you're banned again, I imagine.

a move New Order couldn't imagine in their most E-driven fantasies.

Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson is among the more colorful personalities in rock music, but he’s even more fun when he’s on drugs. At least that’s what we gather from an interview he did with Classic Rock shortly after his 60th birthday. Asked about his favorite drugs, he responded, “Cannabis, I think, is the best,” but then went on to expound on the many wonders of MDMA:

I did take ecstasy and that was fun. That was in the mid-90s. I loved it. So many relationships opened up and became deeper, and they remain so. It’s the one drug where you have those sorts of experiences and they stay with you. I found that after a while that was wearing off. The more you do it, the less it feels like those first times.

Lifeson then goes on to tell a hilarious story about doing ecstasy with his wife and listening to a lot of Nine Inch Nails and Tool:

I remember doing E one night with my wife, just the two of us. In the living room in our old house we had a huge sound system – 6,000 watts or something. We got dressed up and sat there drinking orange juice and smoking about a thousand cigarettes and we listened to Nine Inch Nails and Tool – all this loud, intense, heavy music. We had such a ball.

So there you have it. Not only does Alex Lifeson listen to heavy rock music, but he listens to it exactly as it’s intended to be heard.

Alex Lifeson, my man!

Amazing story

He "sat around" listening to Tool. What a waste!

Honestly, when I saw Tool live I was silently begging for a comfortable chair. They're dull as shit live.

In that sort of situation, you'd wanna be blasting something suitable that brings on that irresistible compulsion to shake arse. I'll bet Nine Inch Nails got him moving.

Pretty hip for a guy in Rush nonetheless.

I wonder if he ever listened to New Order or has an opinion on The Cure.

I bet he has.

wouldn't be at all surprising

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/mar/24/rush-moving-pictures

"as the 70s became the 80s Rush changed again, just as dramatically as they had when Peart joined. Hair was cut, and so were song lengths. Synths appeared. Lee was listening to Ultravox and Simple Minds, while the influence of the Police and Talking Heads was all over 1980's Permanent Waves and its massive hit single, Spirit of Radio."

a big reveal in This Is Not A Photograph, the Mission of Burma documentary is their manager said that right at they broke up they had just turned down an opening slot on Rush's North American tour

if they knew Burma and Ultravox it's probably safe to say they knew the Cure and New Order

Peart was 31 in 1983, Geddy and Alex were 30, the same age as David Byrne

Toronto station CFNY ("The Spirit of Radio"!)'s top albums list of 1982 includes both Rush and New Order: http://www.spiritofradio.ca/Charts.asp#1981

Uh: http://www.spiritofradio.ca/Charts.asp#1982

the Cure have gone through several drummers and afaik there's nobody arguing that a drummer change resulted in a severe reset of their sound

Not to suggest that Joan has not otherwise been joyously otm on this thread, but 96% of everybody would argue that (per Josh's caveat) a drummer change was coincident with a reset of their sound.

In the Tolhurst years, his limitations are the same as the other players to begin with, and as their skill increases beyond his, he continues to suit the style. There's a tension in the music, Smith trying to create big soundscapes with scant instrumentation, at the same time as his lyrics grow to express a tension between wracking emotions and fears, and his trained British incommunicativeness. Lol's slowly progressing drums help to keep an audible foot on the brake, a reassurance, a groundedness.

The addition of drum machines, delightfully, gave Smith a freedom that Lol's mechanical feel didn't, and then the Smith-plus-Andy-Anderson lineup gets you the immediate swerve of Love Cats, followed by the unprecedented freakout of The Top.

Boris then arrives and unshowily anchors the next decade's lineups of skilled musicians (plus Simon) who can play pop or goth or dreamy or heavy or airy or heartsick, whatever Bob or they are taken by in the grasp of whim, but have it all sound ineffably Like The Cure, no longer like a weird experiment that Robert Smith was trying at 4am with a wired engineer and a session bloke.

(they do this by completely reinventing what Like The Cure sounds like at this point, but they do it definitively. also nb Simon is good not bad)

And then Jason Thudfist turns up and institutes a quarter-century reign of boredom over the band's sound.

DJP can school us all on which songs from the 21st Century are Pretty Good Actually and The B-Sides That Should Have Been Singles, but every time I think "I am certain he is correct but also every flaw in them is surely borified by a factor of at least 4 due to the drumming," and my brain falls asleep and crawls out of my ear by the time I've played two youtubes, so I can never remember anything about them

is DJP still around?

To pointlessly add to the Cure comparisons in this thread, I will say that as I move through middle age, the Cure move me less and less, whereas New Order still have a massive emotional impact. I don't think I could articulate why though.

I find a lot of New Order and Rush oddly comforting. Though I currently listen to the Cure more than I ever did before, not least for catharsis but also for all those great pop moments.

Maybe I should have included another poll option

who is Rush's The Cure

Triumph

It may have been mentioned upthread but there's the occasional Cure song that does that Peter Hook bass melody thing, isn't there? Esp. obvious in the intro. Although the chronology sometimes runs the other way: the intro to "Sunrise" off Lowlife is like a sped-up version of that from "The Holy Hour" off Faith, and that of "All the Way" from Technique has a hint of "In-between Days".

I don't think The Cure does that thing better than New Order though. (As for the actual poll - New Order 1981-1989 are pretty much my favourite band ever, whereas I don't think I've ever knowingly heard Rush. I thought I had, but it turned out to be by Asia. I mostly know them from a line in a Pavement song. I know I shouldn't be voting.)

the cure and new order often have very similar melodic sensibilities and often have prominent chorus pedal bass guitar melodies etc., so the comparison makes a lot of sense to me but i disagree with turrican's assertion that the cure were better at the musical territory where they overlap. like both are great at it but new order are more consistently great at that thing and i tend to enjoy their discography more, while the cure are much broader in sound and with that there's a lot of inconsistency.

wrt to the poll new order are probably my favourite band ever but it's hard to think of a band i'm more ambivalent on than rush? what i've heard of them is generally fine but not really my thing

'A Forest' is such a great song that New Order managed to get not one, but two songs out of it, and both are on Low-Life. 'Sunrise' mimics the intro without using the same chord progression, and 'This Time of Night' actually uses the chord progression. 'Sunrise' is fantastic, but not a patch on 'A Forest' ...

The same with 'All the Way' and 'Just Like Heaven', they're both great, but 'Just Like Heaven' has the edge.

But nobody does Rush better than Rush!

Chord progressions are chord progressions, lots of them sound the same because lots of them are the same. I don't know why but I can't really imagine New Order sitting round listening to the Cure.

Well, they were both around at the same time so I'm willing to bet that they were aware of and listened to each other.

I'd like to think that if Ian Curtis had lived, he would have enjoyed the idea of being in The Cure.

Possibly. Robert Smith was a big fan of Joy Division, that's pretty obvious.

here's a Cure cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart, to stay relentlessly on-topic itt

OK, I have now listened to one Rush song. It was called "Tom Sawyer" (the first thing YouTube threw at me). It's one of the worst things I've ever heard, amazing really how it combines so much to hate. My knowledge of both bands still rather lopsided but fuck it, I'm voting.

listening to one song by a band and voting is such bullshit I gotta say

"well now I know all I need to know about that!!!" congratulations, you're the spitting image of a Trump voter

It is one of their most famous songs though.

the stakes are exactly the same too, so I feel suitably chided for having heard no Rush songs but voting New Order

I did hear Mix Master Mike scratching the drums from Tom Sawyer on 32kbps live streams when he joined the Beastie Boys in 1998 though

It's more like seeing only that clip of Trump mocking a disabled person and knowing everything there is to know.

If you hate "Tom Sawyer" and love New Order, it's probably fair for you to safely cast your vote tbh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9kYUhd7e6Y

I haven't heard that album in 20+ years but it came back into my head in an instant.