Well, that happened quickly. I knew that eventually New Order dropped the post-punk and went toward more dancey sounds, but I didn’t expect it to happen all at once. Power, Corruption & Lies is the sound of New Order shedding the Joy Division almost entirely, and the results are fantastic. Heartfelt, richly textured, fun (who’da thought we’d throw that adjective at Joy Division alums?), it’s every bit deserving of its reputation as one of the landmark alt-culture records of the ’80s.

If there’s an argument to be made against this album, it’s of its legacy, which has been considerably diluted by the oversaturated indie-pop hoard of the mid-2000s: there’s a lot here–for example, “The Village,”–that anticipates Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (whom I enjoy) and its blog-rock offspring (whom I enjoy considerably less), and it’s only fair to admit that I’m still mostly burned out on that sound. Even if we’re not gazing that far into the future, though, we don’t have to go too far before twee, Elephant 6, and indie dance step into the long shadow of Power, Corruption & Lies. The feeling of discovery that must have come from hearing this record has been lost to time (although I’m still surprised at just how quickly the band jumped into the full-on synth dance of its middle tracks). I used a similar line of thinking to explain why I wasn’t completely over-the-moon about Unknown Pleasures.

So given all that, it should be taken as a mark of the album’s supreme excellence that I’m still so enthusiastic about Power, Corruption & Lies. “Age of Consent” is as wonderful of an opener as I’ve ever heard, probably my favorite new discovery out of this whole Joy Division/New Order record club cycle so far, and though it’s been the album standout since I first listened to the record the other day, it’s not nearly the only thing going for the LP. The lengthy “5 8 6” that closes out the first side is a gripping dance track that transitions perfectly from side one’s pop to side two’s looping dance-floor grooves. One of the chief pleasures of this album is its structure, that bell curve from earnest pop to cool dance beats and then back to pop for the last few minutes of the record, and the gamut of diverse sounds the band runs through that curve is never boring. It’s a shifting, multifaceted album that packs a career’s worth of sounds into its 42 minutes.

So I like it. A lot. Whether it’s topped Movement‘s strange explorations is something I’m still sorting out, but regardless of how that settles, I’m very much looking forward to the rest of New Order’s output.