Whereas Waiting for the Sirens’ Call was split between the modern rock sounds of Get Ready and the classic New Order dance-pop of the band’s golden years, 2013’s Lost Sirens seems content to just take sides with Get Ready. I’m fine with this. I like both albums (and Lost Sirens, for that matter), but Get Ready still feels fresher and more energetic, and here in the midst of the 21st century, that first post-hiatus album seems to be as much of a change of pace for this increasingly static band as we’ll ever get, which is all the better for Lost Sirens.

Wikipedia’s hedging its bets on Lost Sirens‘s status as an actual studio album, calling it instead a compilation, but even though these tracks all hail from the Waiting for the Sirens’ Call sessions, I’d say the album more than earns its keep as an autonomous release on its own right. The production is punchier, the songs are hookier, and the record as a whole is tighter. I’ll admit, that 38-minute runtime is a big selling point here after the hour-long bloat of both Get Ready and Waiting. Gone are the filler tracks and forgettable tunes from both those records; Lost Sirens is lean and, if not mean (has New Order ever been mean?), at least serious about providing a solid listening experience at any given minute.

So, weak cash-in younger sibling release this is not. The easiest point of comparison is “I Told You So,” the only song that both Waiting and Lost Sirens share and Exhibit A of what works better about Lost Sirens. On Waiting, “I Told You So” is a dance-tinged track among a whole gaggle of dance-tinged tracks, its melody both flattened by the dance beats and made forgettable by its placement in the middle of an hour’s worth of similar tracks. On Lost Sirens, though, “I Told You So” is remixed with a “Be My Baby” percussion section and rockier instrumentation that turns the song into a attention-grabbing stomper and no longer a mid-album track but the actual closer, which it manages memorably. Such is true of the whole album: more memorable, more effectively mixed, better.

That’s not to say that Waiting for the Sirens’ Call is bad or even that Lost Sirens is, like, really good. By the standards of post-millennial New Order, it’s got a little more going for it than its predecessor; by the standards of music in general, though, it’s still in that vein of pleasant but not particularly exciting rock that’s kept the recent New Order albums from getting me up out of my chair. Perspective, I guess.