How cool is coldness?

By JON PARELES
First Published: February 12, 1989, New York Times

How cool is coldness? For the British band New Order, nearly a decade of cold standoffishness, musically and otherwise, has paid off with one of rock's most dedicated cult followings. New Order songs have become standards for college radio stations and rock dance clubs and moved on to more commercial outlets; despite a stage presence best described as efficient, New Order concerts are dependable sellouts. With a poker-faced public image and deadpan music, New Order proves that playing hard to get still works in the 1980's - especially when the message behind the enigma assures fans of their own superior individuality.

As Bernard Albrecht sings in ''All the Way'' on the band's new album ''Technique'' (Qwest/Warner Bros. 25845), ''It takes years to find the nerve to be apart from what you've done/ To find the truth inside yourself and not depend on anyone.''

''Technique'' continues New Order's long-established marketing mystique. It's packaged with a minimum of information - a cover photograph (some sort of colorized, scientific scan of a statue) without a word on the front; titles and recording credits in small print on the back with the Universal Price Code; another photograph of a statue and the same credits are repeated on the liner. With its 1985 album ''Low-life,'' New Order began allowing its name and album title to appear on the cover's spine, plus a sticker on the shrink wrap to identify the album for potential buyers. But band members' names, faces and instrument credits are still absent, as are lyrics; song titles are related to the songs obliquely, if at all. The lack of data makes every fan an initiate, sharing a mass-produced secret.

New Order got started in the wake of Joy Division, a band formed in the industrial city of Manchester during the late-1970's punk explosion and named after the prostitution barracks in Nazi concentration camps. Joy Division evolved from playing typical loud, fast punk rock to slower, even darker songs that presaged the moody post-punk rock of Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes and others. In 1980, Joy Division's lead singer, Ian Curtis, killed himself, making many of his lyrics seem prophetic. The surviving band members continued as New Order, adding not a lead singer but a keyboardist-guitarist, Gillian Gilbert. Where Mr. Curtis had been a wild, tormented performer like his idols Iggy Pop and Jim Morrison, New Order was impassive behind Mr. Albrecht's insinuating, Milquetoast voice.

New Order's music continued the trajectory begun by Joy Division. As drum machines and synthesizers grew easier to use, guitar-powered rock shared albums with mechanical, synthesizer-driven pop, still incorporating the band's signature sound, sustained melody lines played on bass by Peter Hook - lines that seemed to lift the music from within. Soon, New Order was assembling abundantly catchy songs with melodic hooks bubbling in every register. Although they tended to be marches rather than syncopated funk, dance clubs began to pick them up.

Meanwhile, New Order was honing its message. The music might be catchy and cheering, despite its martial undertones, but it camouflaged words that told another story - of distrust, betrayal, anger and resolute isolation, a universe in which the singer could only rely on himself. In his gentle tenor croon, Mr. Albrecht was likely to be hurling accusations or vowing vengeance or licking his wounds; even lines that would fit into other bands' love songs (''I've never met anyone quite like you before'') took on paranoid connotations. New Order fans willing to pry lyrics loose from the music and piece them together found a sullen, self-righteous narcissism.

New Order was praised for its well-tuned ironies and for defying typical pop optimism, as well as for its adeptly infectious music. Part of rock's mandate is to reveal the cultural unconscious, warts and all, and New Order's mushrooming popularity showed they were on to something nasty and true. As with 1980's politicians, an affable exterior could mask a ruthless core. But the band's adoring cult didn't mind that New Order had settled into a formula of its own, from the tight-lipped packaging to the catchy/cutting songs. ''Technique'' shows just how threadbare that formula has become.

The album attempts to move New Order even closer to current dance-pop. Its first single, ''Finetime,'' tries to make a stock sentiment ring ominously amid a cornucopia of synthesizer hooks, as Mr. Albrecht growls, ''You're much too young to mess around with me'' and later intones, in an artificial voice, ''You got love technique''; the song may intend to hint at dark incestuous urges, but it just sounds forced.

Most of the album's other songs are also about thwarted love affairs, with the singer at the mercy of his beloveds - even where, as the songs continue, they're uncomprehending, money-grubbing or just plain gone. Song after song dips into pop cliches - ''You'll come back to me,'' ''How can I ever forget you,'' ''I can't live without your love'' - only to resume with veiled threats and hints of madness: ''I can't find my peace of mind without you.'' Some lyrics, such as in ''Guilty Partner,'' are sung furiously, through gritted teeth; others, like those in ''Mr. Disco,'' simply chug and chime along like half of the songs on the Top 40. The obvious point is that obsession and madness lurk behind every love song - a point that grows less subversive every time around, especially when the cliches start to overrun the insights.

New Order still carries its own point of view, in which the world's one honest soul - the singer, or the fan who identifies with him - is betrayed again and again, until the only possible response to universal perfidy is psychotic rage. It's still not the usual pop romance. But on ''Technique,'' for the first time, New Order's trademarked approach seems nearly as adolescent.