I was going on yesterday about how great my shiny new remixed and remastered definitive CD sounded, and by 28-year-old vinyl sounded good, too. Turns out this CD sounds wonderful, as well. I think the lessons from these experiences are: (1) I should get in the habit of turning up the volume just a little bit more than I'm used to; and (2) I really, really like listening to music. You'd have thought one, if not both, of those might have dawned on me before.
You already know the story of how I first got to know this album, how it was on one side of a much-played cassette in 1985, and the associations it has as a result. But I was never a fan of New Order in the way I was of early Simple Minds, so when I got the CD sixteen years later it was more as a way of revisiting those memories than with the expectation of enjoying the music for its own sake. A thing about those very specific associations: when you revisit them repeatedly, they wear out. So if a particular section of road always reminds you of a car accident you experienced there, keep on travelling it and the memory will become less traumatic. If Proust's narrator (oh yes! I know one thing about Proust and I'm going to shoe-horn it in here) had kept on stuffing his face with madeleine, he'd have found the flashback dulled with each repetition.
The one thing I remembered about Power, Corruption and Lies down the years was the combination of synths and harmonica. Well… it turns out not to have been a harmonica but a melodica (I think) — and it turns out to be on one track only. But what a track! Best known to me as Track 5 on account of there being no tracklisting on the CD cover, I refer of course to Your Silent Face. Miles better than anything on The Best of, my body has a physiological reaction to this song. You know that feeling when the muscles in your neck and shoulder relax when someone's washing your hair, or when your sphincter dilates a little when you recall a particularly exciting sexual encounter (no? you don't get that? too bad, it's great). Well Your Silent Face affects me the same way.
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