Joy Division

In a career as blazing as it was brief — spanning just two years and a handful of dozen shows — the two sole LPs, "Unknown Pleasures" and "Closer", represent for Joy Division something even greater than milestones: two colossal monoliths, two poles that have been magnetizing old and new disciples alike for 25 years. Black and white, like the two albums' sleeves; thesis and antithesis, like the raw sound of the first and the polished sound of the second. And the synthesis of so much musical substance is human drama — the towering drama of vocalist Ian Curtis, who sings his own lucid despair on "Unknown Pleasures" and his own funeral rites on "Closer", handing us a testament of unheard-of power. Faced with such drama, all we can do is stand stunned, dismayed, and above all overwhelmed by a sense of abandonment. Because the place where Joy Division's sound ferries us has only a one-way ticket.

There's something in Joy Division's music that either repels or captures you: instinctively, with no half measures. Either the sound disgusts you, triggering a reaction not unlike the teetotaler's reflex at the touch of alcohol, or it drags you in, trapping the listener in a whirlpool of despair that destroys every immune defense. Because Joy Division's music is sick music, dangerous music, in the way that only rock music can sometimes be.

In expressive intensity, the figure of Ian Curtis recalls two absolute icons of rock: Lou Reed, for the raw depth of his lyrics (the band would pay tribute to Velvet Underground with a cover of "Sister Ray", included on the posthumous double album "Still"), and Jim Morrison, for the explosive intensity of his vocal delivery. But the power and artistic depth of Joy Division can't be measured by Ian Curtis's charisma alone, but also by the new musical formula that would lay the groundwork for an entire movement: goth.

The band came together in the late '70s, right in the thick of the punk and post-punk climate. Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks were among the bands that the four twenty-somethings from Manchester — Ian Curtis (vocals), Bernard Albrecht (guitar), Peter Hook (bass), Steve Morris (drums) — initially looked to with the most interest, models from which they would eventually break away, smoothing out, if only partly, the rawness of their sound. A sound streaked with dark, decadent veins, with musical lines that were at times slowed down and crushingly heavy, which would establish the defining, and perhaps never surpassed, traits of the entire dark-wave movement.

After a first EP, "An Ideal For Living", released in 1977, and after a failed stint with major label RCA, for whom the band recorded about ten songs that were never officially released, the band's brief story sharply accelerated starting in the second half of 1978. Joining a young independent label, Factory, and meeting producer Martin Hannett were the balancing elements that allowed Joy Division to arrive at the fully realized, original sound of "Unknown Pleasures", recorded in April 1979 at Strawberry Studios in Stockport and released in stores that June. The cover art, designed by the band's graphic artist Peter Saville, is among the most powerful and enigmatic in rock. Just a small rectangular diagram, drawn with thin, rippling white lines, stands out against a black background, terrible and full of ominous portents.

Across the album's ten tracks unfolds a kind of initiation rite, and "Disorder", the opening track, immediately lays down the rules of this dangerous, unknown game. A muffled, compressed drum sound over which the bass spins at dizzying, relentless speed, as if possessed, drags us into a nervous — indeed neurotic — dynamic. Because in Joy Division, tension is always synonymous with existential anguish pushed to its extreme consequences, that is, pathology.

With the following "Day Of The Lords", slow and crushingly heavy, we enter the darkest, most desolate room of goth. Out of the darkness, the keyboards fire beams of light, but it's a cutting, searing light, a pure apocalyptic vision. The rough, raw guitar rings out like scrap metal abandoned on the outskirts of an industrial periphery like Manchester, where the four musicians come from. The rhythmic pattern of "Candidate", which in another context might have lulled us, turns into a macabre dance, a harrowing lullaby. The voice, laden with effects, sounds harsh, filtered through an irritating haze. Over the hypnotic back-and-forth of the rhythm section, the guitar spits sparks like an oxyacetylene flame, and the keyboards smear the mix with sinister, anguish-laden touches. The bass on "Insight" traces the sonic rails along which Curtis's stark, mournful melody runs. Then, suddenly, a rain of notes crashes down, swarming irritatingly like insects invading the space of the mind and undermining its balance.

An absolute masterpiece of the album and of goth music as a whole, "New Dawn Fades" plumbs the deepest, most impenetrable depths of the human condition. After the first, already intense bass notes, the guitar strings together two memorable riffs, sharp as the most terrifying of blades, which at once shake the self to its core and, on the surface, lie in ambush for our skin. Joy Division's riffs — now on guitar, now on bass, now both chasing or overlapping each other — are one of the keys to understanding the strength of their music. Absolute simplicity, a handful of notes, repeated relentlessly, that wear down every resistance like drops of water which, falling inexorably and always the same, erode any surface, corroding it.

Contrasting with the crystalline effect of the guitar arpeggio, Curtis's vocal delivery, already steeped in fatalism, swells beyond measure until it explodes and pushes past the limits of the human. The cry rises so high it leaves us breathless: faced with such power, the strings of the soul don't vibrate, they tremble. "She's Lost Control", another classic from the album, is carried by a dynamic bass riff and a muffled drum sound, so compressed it almost sounds electronic. Curtis's voice, itself overflowing with echo, creates an almost martial, hypnotic effect, while the squared-off guitar, closer to canonical rock, locks into a simple chord sequence.

"Shadowplay" is furious, with a bass intro pushed to the edge of distortion. Albrecht's solo works like a stretched-out riff and retains a melodic clarity that momentarily eases the track's tension. The bouncing "Wilderness", with Hook's dragging, pulsing bass, and the fierce "Interzone", which recalls the combat rock of Clash if not outright Zeppelin-esque undertones, lead toward the album's final masterpiece, "I Remember Nothing". Slow and crushingly heavy, the song unfolds over six minutes that represent the final piece of this initiatory journey into goth music. The drums build the rhythmic bed on a few relentless hits; the bass is unbearably somber, with single, weighty notes. The stretched-out tempos and overdubs allow Curtis to express his inner anguish by chasing his own voice. The bed of keyboards creates a permanent thriller-like tension that never finds release, and within this dark sonic blend, the sudden shattering of objects sends jolts through the listener's consciousness. They are existential lashings that leave wounds open, forever.

In "Unknown Pleasures", Curtis's existential drama still has the strength to turn into rage, into a devastating force exploding outward. But it's the last, desperate cry toward a reality from which Ian would, within a few months, inexorably drift away. With the following, monumental "Closer", that step is indeed taken — toward the eternal.

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31/10/2006