[music] THE STRING QUARTET TRIBUTE TO JOY DIVISION AND NEW ORDER (Vitamin)

[dot_fennel]

The thing is, this could be brilliant within the string quartet idiom and I wouldn't know. I assume it's not, though, because reasoning from the existence of string quartet tributes on this same label devoted to dozens of other bands including Korn and Audioslave leads me to assume market forces generate these things, not inspiration.

I won't take the purist position that no new arrangement could beat the original ones for these nine songs, but Joy Division's passion and New Order's steeliness resided, somewhat fragilely, in the songs' construction and arrangement. This tribute sacrifices those qualities, then tries to restore them through expressive playing. The results of that kind of process aren't inherently calamitous; it's just that if you replace Lou Reed with a boy-band singer, and then compensate by writing additional lyrics expresing "by the way, I'm a New Yorker... I'm pretty jaded...", then it probably matters how good your boy-band singer is, but it definitely matters how good your lyricist is.

And while I know zero about string quartets, I harbor a suspicion these people are hacks.