BERNARD Sumner and Peter Hook turn 50 next year and look it. Their music, muscular, slinky, rhythmic and propulsive, still wants to pass itself off as considerably younger, however.

As the album title suggests, they are indeed waiting for the sirens' call, singing as ever of the vicissitudes of love and lust, thrust and regret.

Waiting For The Sirens' Call takes the best of 1986's Brotherhood and 2001's resurgent comeback, Get Ready, while re-engaging less successfully with the hi-energy Technique generation of 1989. Glacial keyboard player Gillian Gilbert has finally taken her leave, and in come guitarist Phil Cunningham to freshen up the songwriting and lad quotient, and a Who's Who of producers - Stephen Street, John Leckie, Stuart Price and New Order themselves - to oversee the burst of creativity.

Eighteen songs were finished in seven months - a record rate of productivity by New Order's normally tardy standards - and 11 of them make the final Call. Hook's low-slung bass underpins Sumner's wan, impersonal singing as always, and the nursery-rhyme lyrics - rhyming doin' with ruin after all these years - remain a guilty pleasure as Who's Joe?, the title track, Morning Night And Day and the single Krafty tick all the old New Order boxes.

Any progress or change? Well, the old boys apply the Botox treatment by introducing a skanking beat to I Told You So and making out with Scissor Sister Ana Matronic on the dad disco of Jetstream; then run out of Ibizan puff on Dracula's Castle and Guilt Is A Useless Emotion but amusingly trash an old motor on the closing thrash, Working Overtime.

Updated: 08:57 Thursday, March 31, 2005