Album: Closer
Artist: Joy Division
Born: Salford, Manchester
Released: July 1980
Genre: Gothic Rock
Influenced: Echo & the Bunnymen, The Cure, The Smiths, Moby, Arcade Fire, Smashing Pumpkins
If you were about to listen to Joy Division for the first time, I don't think Closer would be the best place to start. For me, it would be advisable to give Substance a listen first, to get the sense of the journey that the band undertook in just a few years from the punk sound of their first EP, An Ideal For Living (1978) to the austere gothic rock of Closer. Substance also contains some of the band's more accessible work, like Digital and singles Atmosphere and Love Will Tear Us Apart, which offer some of the bells and whistles that are devoid from Closer's dark heart. Music history is peppered with deaths and tragic accidents that leave you asking "what if?" (see yesterday's blog on Nic Jones for instance) but Ian Curtis' suicide just months before this album's release is one of the real imponderables. Everything about Closer is haunting, from its cover (a picture of a tomb in a Genoan graveyard), its title (double meaning of bringing near and bringing to an end) and its production (sparse and intense).
Atrocity Exhibition, with its tribal drums, twisted guitars and invocations of "this is the way, step inside", immediately transports to you a grotesque new landscape. I've read J.G. Ballard's story fragments of the same title and the links are not clear beyond presenting a vision of a dystopian future; I think Curtis was just channeling many of the anxieties about nuclear war and Thatcher's Britain and found a title that dovetailed with those themes. Isolation marks a clear evolution in the band's sound, with Bernard Sumner's high-pitched synths pointing forward to New Order, while Hannett's production effects (such as the tape feedback at the end) and Curtis' singing (yes, he could actually sing at times) create an album highlight. After the dirge of Passover and the militaristic Colony comes the entirely original death disco of A Means To An End, with lyrics that paint a bleak picture of human relationships. From here, the songs give a sense of spiralling into despair, from the ghostly Heart & Soul to the personal apocalypse of Decades ("weary inside, now our heart's lost forever"). While 24 Hours is musically breathtaking, the lyrics are devastating, as Curtis reflects on his life as "a valueless collection of hopes and past desires". The Eternal recaptures the otherworldliness of the Atrocity Exhibition and is the closest thing to a suicide note on the record, its funereal pace combining with lyrics painting a picture of being trapped in a cold, grey universe. I'll never forget the first time I listened to Closer, on a Discman in the back of my parents' car in the late 90s, and that sense of feeling completely altered by it.
If you were about to listen to Joy Division for the first time, I don't think Closer would be the best place to start. For me, it would be advisable to give Substance a listen first, to get the sense of the journey that the band undertook in just a few years from the punk sound of their first EP, An Ideal For Living (1978) to the austere gothic rock of Closer. Substance also contains some of the band's more accessible work, like Digital and singles Atmosphere and Love Will Tear Us Apart, which offer some of the bells and whistles that are devoid from Closer's dark heart. Music history is peppered with deaths and tragic accidents that leave you asking "what if?" (see yesterday's blog on Nic Jones for instance) but Ian Curtis' suicide just months before this album's release is one of the real imponderables. Everything about Closer is haunting, from its cover (a picture of a tomb in a Genoan graveyard), its title (double meaning of bringing near and bringing to an end) and its production (sparse and intense).
Atrocity Exhibition, with its tribal drums, twisted guitars and invocations of "this is the way, step inside", immediately transports to you a grotesque new landscape. I've read J.G. Ballard's story fragments of the same title and the links are not clear beyond presenting a vision of a dystopian future; I think Curtis was just channeling many of the anxieties about nuclear war and Thatcher's Britain and found a title that dovetailed with those themes. Isolation marks a clear evolution in the band's sound, with Bernard Sumner's high-pitched synths pointing forward to New Order, while Hannett's production effects (such as the tape feedback at the end) and Curtis' singing (yes, he could actually sing at times) create an album highlight. After the dirge of Passover and the militaristic Colony comes the entirely original death disco of A Means To An End, with lyrics that paint a bleak picture of human relationships. From here, the songs give a sense of spiralling into despair, from the ghostly Heart & Soul to the personal apocalypse of Decades ("weary inside, now our heart's lost forever"). While 24 Hours is musically breathtaking, the lyrics are devastating, as Curtis reflects on his life as "a valueless collection of hopes and past desires". The Eternal recaptures the otherworldliness of the Atrocity Exhibition and is the closest thing to a suicide note on the record, its funereal pace combining with lyrics painting a picture of being trapped in a cold, grey universe. I'll never forget the first time I listened to Closer, on a Discman in the back of my parents' car in the late 90s, and that sense of feeling completely altered by it.
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