New Order – Guilty Partner

General CommentThe brooding drive of this song evokes the true deep dark madness of hopeless devotion. The absolute depth, the bottom, the delusion. This is about being hooked on a manipulative lover like a drug (drug parallels which are quite apparent). The image of someone with an outreached hand to a drug on a nightstand is evoked by this track. Some of the first lines admits one of the hardest things humans can do: to admit to being not just wrong but severely deluded (for probably years). "But Loooooord it don't come easy/To Admit I was wrong/It took me far too long.". A final realization requiring Sumner to say "listen to me, I know what I'm saying" before that as if outside observers were scoffing saying 'yeah right' at his ever getting out of his delusion.

The two before and after parts of the singer divide the song: The chorus that repeats and repeats, emphasizing the dark depths in that repetition, is the singer in his 'blind to betrayal/blind to gaslighting' absolute bottom. This part is charged and has a dark rasp that conveys that unwavering madness. " I know what it takes to make you my lover" sounds as if the singer is convincing himself that he has power in this situation just because he's able get his drug back and maintain the illusion for a short period that all is well.

The parts where Sumner sings in a floating dreamy tone is the part where he is pulling himself out of this delusion. The first verse and the verse starting with "You once said to me." In that verse the lines "You once said to me/That I was a cruel man/And you know/ That I almost believed you/I was blind, and I couldn't see/ You took my sight from me." seems to show a clear gaslighting situation. He says these lines as if in a haze. So Guilty Partner is a continuation of Round & Round the track before. It's as if this level of madness and disorientation needed more explicating. Many songs on Technique are about this relationship. Maybe that is Technique's great gift to us. It's an attempt to understand and express the deep profound scramble that happens in relationships with truly manipulative unfeeling (sociopathic even) people. Pinning it all on something, hoping they are different, hoping they will change.

Guilty Lover's greatness comes in this attempt to capture the craving hunger and mad despair of deluded hopeless devotion. The propulsion of the bass, loud drums hits and the oddly pleasant yet macabre mandolin all combine to give us a picture so bleak it's make us recoil at the darkness. At least we know that he has extracted himself from this situation but we feel the shock still in the past like a trauma. The other Sumner is past it, but the feeling of being painted the guilty partner still haunts even though he is now aware that it was the other person who was the guilty partner. Damn.

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