Electronic answers the question: “What would The Smiths sound like if they merged with New Order?” When Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner's first single, the heavenly Getting Away With It arrived in 1989, caramelized by vocals from Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant and strings courtesy of The Art Of Noise's Anne Dudley, a new supergroup was lauded. It took them two years to follow up with a much craved full album.
Get The Message, Tighten Up and Idiot Country stretch wings caged by the claustrophobic confines of their daytime bands whilst b-sides Free Will (included in the extras) and Lucky Bag (not) kept a covert toe on the underground dance floors. Sometimes literally electronic (Reality; Gangster) with splashes of jangle, the album cleanses the palette after a week's e-benderring in Ibizan superclubs. Even when Barney raps (badly) to a housey piano hook, your baggy t-shirt will billow and make you fly.
The bonus disc is a perfunctory fire-sale of jumble rummaged from the basements of all three albums. Superb PSB lead single Disappointed is a worthy starter and alternate mixes of a couple of later album tracks intrigue, but six instrumentals all prove to be anaemic. The awful remix of Feel Every Beat exhumes the corpse of New Order's Ruined In A Day (Bogle Mix) in a selection that could have complemented the euphoric elan of the parent album much better. The ragtaggle assortment sadly seems to put pay to expanded versions of the Prozac saturated Raise The Pressure or bombastic Twisted Tenderness albums, the rostering of which may have meant a stronger reissue. Twenty-two years later though, Electronic remains a Madchester classic.
