Bad Lieutenant

By the time Peter Hook exited New Order in 2007, the reigning kings of brooding electro-pop were long overdue their valedictory bow. The bassist went on to write his book about the fabled “Madchester scene,” The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club. Former bandmates Bernard Sumner and Phil Cunningham formed Bad Lieutenant, a band whose name, inspired by the Abel Ferrara cult film about a rogue cop, doesn’t quite forecast the brooding edge we’d hoped for.

There’s no way around it: This is shameless, throwback, ’80s-friendly, big-hair pop. With studio visits from Blur bassist Alex James and former NO drummer Stephen Morris, the album’s best moments evoke the chimey melodicism of vintage R.E.M. (“Sink or Swim”) and the harmonic uplift of a U2 outtake, circa ’85 (“Dynamo”). None of it sucks, but it makes us wonder how musicians who invented one of the most distinct sounds of the past 20 years could choose to be so generic.

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