Maybe this would have been different if I'd grown up in a city with a more active local music scene or a college radio station, or if I'd had the sort of social circle in which forging fake IDs and sneaking into bars wouldn't have seemed pathetic and pointless, but for the formative years of my musical life, music came from mainstream commercial radio. Either I listened to it on the radio, or I taped it off the radio onto my little boom-box, or I heard it on the radio and then bought the records, but in any case I learned, long before I was aware that it was a thing one could learn, rather than an intrinsic truth, that rock music (much of which was pop, of course, but nobody cool called it that) is made by rock stars. And since you and I do not get to interact with rock stars as if they are people, process of elimination suggests that they are objects, and listening to their music is thus an act of anonymous consumption. I don't think I ever had a sense, buying all those Big Country singles in the mid-Eighties, that I was supporting Big Country, because I didn't realize until much later that support might be an applicable concept. I was just collecting, collecting records the same way I collected bottle caps in museum parking lots or little plastic football helmets from IHOP when I was younger. Records existed, and I wanted them; other people weren't involved, and the transactions were invariably unidirectional.

If "the next New Order" becomes a title worth coveting, for some reason, one of the few bands poised to challenge Barcelona for it is Hewson Chen and Joshua Klein's studio project Vitesse. As of their first record, A Certain Hostility, they struck me as a reiteration of Stephin Merritt's Magnetic Fields on the way to being a streamlined improvement on the Magnetic Fields, but since then Merritt made 69 Love Songs, after which I ceased expecting anybody else to improve on his aesthetic, and for either that reason or one of their own, Chen and Klein have steered Vitesse a few degrees further from Merritt's course for their second album, and although the vocal styles continue to resemble Merritt's, or a parody of Merritt at his glummest, the arrangements have begun to exchange Merritt's baroque toy-instrument tendencies for a clicky old-Factory-Records-ish patterned drive. Hissing hi-hats, sharp snare cracks, buzzing bass loops and high, stabbing synth chords drive the sumptuous, dance-y "When Nothing's Changed", the opener. "Brighter Than the Sky" is slower, coruscating mallet-synth shimmers falling over a spare drum-machine rattle and Chen and Klein's vocal rounds. The spindly guitars and boomy drums of "Philosophy or Forgetfulness" and the jarring chords and glum vocals of "These Long Centuries" push back past New Order towards Joy Division, but the picked guitar cycles and muted drum loop of "The Footpath" could have been borrowed from Trembling Blue Stars, and "Wicks & Fuses" invokes some Pet Shop Boys disco by way of the Future Bible Heroes' "Hopeless". "Good Fortune" might be Merritt improvising over the backing tracks from some forgotten "Shell Shock"-era New Order outtake, but "A Kiss, an Interrogation" sounds more like an old Jesus & Mary Chain song denuded of all its distortion and feedback. The quick, jittery, drum-machine-loaded "Everything's Amiss" is segmented like a mid-Eighties extended remix, although it's barely three minutes long. The disconsolate singing on "A Telegram, the Telegraph" distracts from what would otherwise be an excellent, twittery little instrumental in the vein of Assembly and Simple Minds b-sides, but "Stolz Darauf" splits the difference between Frankie Goes to Hollywood effusion and Merritt's "Born on a Train" reticence fairly elegantly. And "Swinging Bachelor Pad", the conclusion, another hammering drum loop under glitterball synth cascades, edges towards Peter Godwin. If I'm in the wrong mood, a few of these moments seem a shade too contrived to me, like they've built a whole song around a single drum loop out of some misplaced devotion to Greek unities, not because the song wouldn't have been better off with a variation or two, or like they were tempted to do some real singing but decided an album with ten songs that sound like Stephin Merritt and two that sound like Jim Kerr would be too weird. And where it's my impression that Barcelona sound like an old New Wave band because that's just the sound that happens when they get together to play, I'm betting that Vitesse prepped for this, and may even have picked specific New Order songs to emulate. The lyrics are unremarkable, and my only idea about what "Chelsea 27099" refers to evaporated when I found out that the ZIP code 27099 is in North Carolina. But like Merritt, Chen and Klein are archivists at heart, and if A Certain Hostility served as a summary what-went-before preface to 69 Love Songs for me, bracketing Merritt's old work by imagining its logical reduction, then maybe Chelsea 27099 is their attempt to exhume the common morbidity Merritt used to share with Ian Curtis, now that Merritt has transcended it, and imagine what Curtis might have made if he'd been able to do the same. It's a long way from "Love Will Tear Us Apart" to "The Sun Goes Down and the World Goes Dancing", but sometimes the long journeys are the most necessary.