Joy Division: Closer

Closer

Best song: Decades

Worst song: Colony

Overall grade: 7

People always debate as to whether ‘Unknown Pleasures’ or ‘Closer’ is a better record. The fact that there’s no real consensus opinion really says a lot about the band’s strength, but in my opinion, this one wins out – but only by the tiniest fraction. Course, ‘Pleasures’ has better cover art, so it evens out in the end. Anyway, I’m hoping this review will be a little easier to write than the last Joy Division one – I have more notes made for this, so let’s see…

Interestingly, pretty much all of the reviews I’ve read of this have given it a perfect score. The notable exception is Robert Christgau (who was surprised by that? Not me!) and I completely understand their viewpoints. It doesn’t have a major flaw. Well, it has things that would be major flaws on other records, such as being ridiculously dark and having the same repetitive mood throughout, but this record breaks all the rules by making those things good. Innovation-wise, this group achieved more in two albums than the Rolling Stones have in fifty years. (That’s not a dig at the Stones, by the way. I love them but you can’t deny they never really invented anything, which puts things into perspective.)

This thing has songs; nine of them to be precise. In general they’re slightly longer than those on ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and consequently it feels like they have plenty of time to either develop or to crush your soul. ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ is brilliant as an opener. It’s heavy, dissonant and relentless with chilling screams going on in the background. There’s also a bunch of machinery-type noises in it which sound kind of like industrial rock before that was even a thing. Also, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook randomly traded instruments for the song. I don’t know if that changes it but I think it’s a really cool thing for a band to do.

Side 2 opens with a really quiet, creepy bassline, and then we’re in ‘Heart & Soul’. The instruments are kind of mixed the wrong way round, so we have the rhythm section at the forefront while the vocals are pushed more into the background, giving them an echoey sound, like Ian Curtis is separated from everybody else. That’s oddly prophetic. The pace of the album increases for ‘Twenty Four Hours’; the mood doesn’t, but that’s not the only difference with this song. The instrumental parts of it seem to me like the only time where the members (other than Ian) seem properly human. At other times the keyboards and drum machines have an eerie, robotic regularity about them.

‘The Eternal’ comes next, starting with what I can only describe as tuneful static, and turning into a very slow, gothic song that could very well be a funeral march. And then Curtis’ career comes to an end with the outstanding, darkly beautiful ‘Decades’, backed with a shimmering guitar and basically standing as a summation of everything Joy Division. And that’s where we leave them – a band that had two very powerful, very different albums (plus a single, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, that links them). And as devastating as Curtis’ suicide was (and still is), maybe it’s for the best. This way, no future releases will ever try to ruin the brilliance of these two. As much as music can be, they’re untouchable.

(I don’t think this was anywhere near as bad as the last one! Maybe I’ll get round to rewriting that someday…)

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures

Unknown Pleasures

Best song: She’s Lost Control

Worst song: Interzone

Overall grade: 6

I recently saw someone wearing an ‘Unknown Pleasures’ T-shirt and had an internal debate about whether to go over and talk to them. I didn’t, because I knew there was a chance they didn’t actually know the album and just liked the design, but assuming they did, it made me realise: it isn’t an album you just listen to quietly, put away and don’t tell anyone about. You have to wear its T-shirt, send it to your friends, and shout out: ‘Unknown Pleasures is freaking awesome!’

Since its release it’s come to be labelled as ‘post-punk’, but at the time, it defied classification. It clearly had punk influences, but it was different. More focused. Very cold, calculated and relentlessly dark. Every part of it feels like it has a direction – that  Ian Curtis knew exactly what he was doing and wasn’t going to settle for any filler or anything that didn’t demand your full attention.

‘She’s Lost Control’, with its strong and repeated vocal hook, was the only song that really stood out to me on first listen, with everything else blending into one, but over time I’ve come to appreciate the differences between them. For example, you’ve got ‘Wilderness’, which is the one that’s full of the intermittent drum parts, ‘Disorder’ is the one with the awesome bassline, ‘I Remember Nothing’ is the one that’s mostly built on atmosphere, and ‘Interzone’ is the one that nobody actually cares about.     

The melodies here are unpredictable and slightly messed up – you can see this best on ‘Day of the Lords’, one of the better slower songs, although who cares about the minor difference in quality between this song and the almost-as-good ‘Candidate’ with its call-and-response bass/vocal lines, or the haunting ‘New Dawn Fades’? Also, can you tell I’m finding this review really difficult to write? I guess this is an album that’s incredibly hard to find words for. You know every song has an effect, but working out what that effect is is much harder.

A friend of mine likes Joy Division in theory but complains about the vocals. Ian Curtis certainly can’t sing as well as he writes, but his singing does nevertheless add to the lyrics. In places it’s full of emotion, and then in other places it’s even more effective in the way it’s robotic and apathetic, which is a far better description of depression.

If I had a list of top albums based on production, this would be my favourite. It’s pretty much perfect, creating an illusion of spaciousness and distance and the idea that you can never quite reach it. ‘Interzone’ may be weaker, and ‘I Remember Nothing’ an acquired taste to many, but I really think this album can only be appreciated properly when it’s listened to all at once. It’s such an insight (haha, Joy Division puns) into how Ian Curtis was feeling at the time he was writing it, yet at the same time, it still seems surrounded in mystery.