One can’t help but wonder what the late Ian Curtis would have thought of the music the other members of Joy Division would go on to make after his death. With each passing decade, the musical sensibilities of his former band mates seem to drift further away from Joy Division’s.

Take Bad Lieutenant. With New Order officially broken up, Bernard Sumner has moved on to this project, an unremarkable but pleasant enough New Order-esque  outfit. Also featuring Phil Cunningham, who briefly replaced Gillian Gilbert as NO’s keyboardist, and Jake Evans, their debut  includes contributions from such notable musicians as fellow New Order ex-pat Stephen Morris and Blur’s Alex James.

My fellow Pure Popper Tanner recently summed up Sumner’s song-writing motus operandi as succinctly as I’ve ever heard, suggesting the majority of his songs are “populist love songs.” I couldn’t put it better myself. Whereas the Joy Divisions of this world deal in the morbid and bleak, Sumner’s more inclined to fill an album with a dozen or so declarations of affection.

Should you bother with this album? Well, if you liked Get Ready and Waiting for the Siren’s call, absolutely. If you didn’t, or you never bothered to check them out, steer clear. It’s only the absence of Peter Hook’s bass sound that makes this record distinguishable from latter-day New Order.

Would Ian Curtis have liked it? One shudders to think what an Ian Curtis pushing 60 would have thought about anything. I, for one, adore it.