In the 29 years since New Order last performed in the Twin Cities, its once-futuristic brand of highly danceable, hopelessly melancholy synth-rock has gone out of fashion and come back in vogue again.
It may have just been good timing — and a relatively hi-fi visual production, too — that kept the pioneering British band's worth-the-wait concert Thursday at the Palace Theater from feeling strictly like a nostalgia act, even though it very much was.
Based on Thursday's 2¼-hour set, if New Order had been added as a co-headliner with either the red-hot Chvrches or Marian Hill on the Palace's 2018 shows list, nobody would think it out of place musically; although Chvrches fans who weren't even alive yet for the last local N.O. gig might think it odd a guy who now looks like a graying Jack Lemmon is up there fronting that other group.
Singer/guitarist Bernard Sumner, drummer Stephen Morris, keyboardist Gillian Gilbert and a couple hired guns played almost exclusively to Gen-X fans in St. Paul, a solid age line perhaps drawn by the Palace-high $80 tickets. These old-school fans didn't balk at the prices. The show sold out instantaneously, and upon arrival a lot of them lined up for the $40 T-shirts featuring early-'80s album covers.
Thursday's 20-song set list — the kickoff to a short U.S. tour following a mostly quiet year — leaned heavily though not entirely on the classic LPs. During the encore, the selections went back even further to a trio of songs by Joy Division, the band that New Order grew out of following the 1980 death of singer Ian Curtis.
First, though, came a couple reminders that New Order has been making records all along.
The show opened with "Singularity," a fever-pitch, intensely whirring rocker off the otherwise mostly lackluster 2015 album "Music Complete." That was followed by the band's last big hit, "Regret," which dates way back to 1993 but was a new one so far as the deprived Twin Cities crowd was concerned.
Sumner humorously showed his unfamiliarity with the market when, as he said hello, he had to conspicuously pause and think about which of the twin towns finally landed the gig.
