JOY DIVISION: UNKNOWN PLEASURES (REVIEW)
December 7th 2006 11:30
JOY DIVISION
UNKNOWN PLEASURES
(1979; FACTORY)
RATING
TRACK LISTING: 1) Disorder / 2) Day Of The Lords / 3) Candidate / 4) Insight / 5) New Dawn Fades / 6) She’s Lost Control / 7) Shadowplay / 8) Wilderness / 9) Interzone / 10) I Remember Nothing
A while back, during a discussion via the comments section of my Regulations Review post, Adrian of Philosophy Blog fame asked about the possibility of doing a Joy Division review. Now, Joy Division were a well-hung band, and I know that’s in poor taste, but that’s the only chuckles you’re going to get out of me in this review. This is serious.
There’s a lot of Joy Division imitators out there but where most of them ring false is that they’ve confused the romance and myth of Joy Division as some kind of cooler-than-thou pose. Joy Division were working class lads growing up in the depressing industrial wasteland that is Manchester. There’s no room for posturing and pretension when everyone at the pub knows who you are and what you came from, and Unknown Pleasures (1979) speaks volumes about that existence. Joy Division's sound is romantic because it’s real, and mythic because it all ended before it had really begun; their demise no less magnificent and tragic than that of a dying sun.
Did you see what I did there? I made reference to the album’s cover image of the final flashes of a dying star, and used that as an analogy for the band’s career. This is exactly the kind of superlative overstatement and smarmy cleverness that Unknown Pleasures is NOT about.
Vocalist, Ian Curtis never really became a star, sadly hanging himself before “Love Will Tear Us Apart” broke big in the UK. But this debut album is where him and the other members of Joy Division—bassist Peter Hook, guitarist Bernard Sumner, and drummer Stephen Morris—really started to take their collective loneliness out of the bedroom and into the echoey music halls and pubs of England, only to realise that you can still feel isolated, sometimes even more so, in a crowded room.
Martin Hannett’s eerie production gives the band an echoey and cavernous sound on Unknown Pleasures that is the perfect match to their themes of self-doubt, failure, and isolation. This album shows a move away from their earlier punkier material, but the laddishness of the Sex Pistols still lingers briefly, even while they take the roboticism of Kraftwerk and marry it to the intensity of the Stooges and the artful drone of the Velvet Underground. That’s a three-way marriage, as doomed to end as the epileptic and clinically depressed frontman Ian Curtis seemingly was. But it’s captured here in all its fleeting beauty, the production haunting and distant, allowing the music to reach out to you from the abyss.
It isn’t all doom ‘n’ gloom, but a bleak, almost empty atmosphere pervades even the most upbeat tracks on this album. “Disorder” announces the band’s intent immediately, with Morris’s stiff drumming, Hook’s chunkily melodic bass, and Sumner’s cold and tinny yet nagging and expressive guitar lines, all accentuated by the churning, swirling synths. Apart from the ocean-like rise ‘n’ fall of “Shadowplay” and the punked-up “Interzone”, “Disorder” is the only truly rocking track on here. But even these more buoyant and catchy numbers have a sense of foreboding and melancholy, and an air-filled hollowness that makes Curtis’s sense of loneliness almost palpable.
Curtis’s voice might take a bit of getting used to. It’s uncomfortably deep and booming in a style probably inspired by David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s ‘German’ periods. But his quavering baritone only serves to highlight the fragility of a man reaching out for company and solace only to realise his own inability to relate to those around him. It’s particularly effective and affecting on the bubbling “Insight”, the simple mantra of ‘I’m not afraid anymore’ both chilling and uplifting. While his voice is often introverted to match the barren, insular nature of much of this dirge-like material, his vocals sometimes reach out, trying to feel something: ANYTHING. It’s there in his desperate pleading of ‘where will it end?’ over choppy, scraping guitars and swelling faux strings in “Day Of The Lords”; and in the slowly building anger of “New Dawn Fades”, his vocals soaring over what is one of the band’s heaviest, sludgiest grooves.
This album is a benchmark in both performance and production, and the use of electronics doesn’t sound outdated now because they are subtle and atmospheric. Okay, I admit the spooky sounds in “Disorder” remind me of Spider-man, and the chattery breaks that act as choruses on “Insight” sound like something from a late-‘70s shoot-em-up game; but these whiffs of cheese don’t detract one little bit. The electronic atmosphere gets no better than on “She’s Lost Control” where Morris’s clattering, reverbed drumming is matched by Hook’s amazingly high ‘n’ dry bass tone to create a desolate groove; while Curtis’s vocals are warped into something strange and haunting, and Sumner’s wonderfully chunky and mean ascending guitar line grinds away, buried in the mix. Sure, Bernie probably won’t be topping any hot-shot guitarist lists anytime soon, but his solo on “Shadowplay” is beautifully simplistic and soulful, and his jagged guitarwork is the essence of post-punk: providing accent and nuance while the rhythm section carries the tunes.
The band’s follow up Closer (1980) and the clutch of singles collected on Substance (1988) are also excellent releases that have cemented the band’s place in the annals of rock history. But for me, Unknown Pleasures is the spark, the smouldering ember to hold in the hand, the cinder that illuminates the dark hallways and helps warm you when the bedroom gets so cold. Unknown Pleasures is absolutely essential, and the sad thing is that these things only become truly clear in hindsight, when
it’s
all
too
little,
too
late…
***
IMAGES
Unknown Pleasures*
* images on this page were taken from the following Wikipedia page:
Unknown Pleasures
UNKNOWN PLEASURES
(1979; FACTORY)
RATING
TRACK LISTING: 1) Disorder / 2) Day Of The Lords / 3) Candidate / 4) Insight / 5) New Dawn Fades / 6) She’s Lost Control / 7) Shadowplay / 8) Wilderness / 9) Interzone / 10) I Remember Nothing
Unknown Pleasures (1979)
There’s a lot of Joy Division imitators out there but where most of them ring false is that they’ve confused the romance and myth of Joy Division as some kind of cooler-than-thou pose. Joy Division were working class lads growing up in the depressing industrial wasteland that is Manchester. There’s no room for posturing and pretension when everyone at the pub knows who you are and what you came from, and Unknown Pleasures (1979) speaks volumes about that existence. Joy Division's sound is romantic because it’s real, and mythic because it all ended before it had really begun; their demise no less magnificent and tragic than that of a dying sun.
Did you see what I did there? I made reference to the album’s cover image of the final flashes of a dying star, and used that as an analogy for the band’s career. This is exactly the kind of superlative overstatement and smarmy cleverness that Unknown Pleasures is NOT about.
Vocalist, Ian Curtis never really became a star, sadly hanging himself before “Love Will Tear Us Apart” broke big in the UK. But this debut album is where him and the other members of Joy Division—bassist Peter Hook, guitarist Bernard Sumner, and drummer Stephen Morris—really started to take their collective loneliness out of the bedroom and into the echoey music halls and pubs of England, only to realise that you can still feel isolated, sometimes even more so, in a crowded room.
Martin Hannett’s eerie production gives the band an echoey and cavernous sound on Unknown Pleasures that is the perfect match to their themes of self-doubt, failure, and isolation. This album shows a move away from their earlier punkier material, but the laddishness of the Sex Pistols still lingers briefly, even while they take the roboticism of Kraftwerk and marry it to the intensity of the Stooges and the artful drone of the Velvet Underground. That’s a three-way marriage, as doomed to end as the epileptic and clinically depressed frontman Ian Curtis seemingly was. But it’s captured here in all its fleeting beauty, the production haunting and distant, allowing the music to reach out to you from the abyss.
It isn’t all doom ‘n’ gloom, but a bleak, almost empty atmosphere pervades even the most upbeat tracks on this album. “Disorder” announces the band’s intent immediately, with Morris’s stiff drumming, Hook’s chunkily melodic bass, and Sumner’s cold and tinny yet nagging and expressive guitar lines, all accentuated by the churning, swirling synths. Apart from the ocean-like rise ‘n’ fall of “Shadowplay” and the punked-up “Interzone”, “Disorder” is the only truly rocking track on here. But even these more buoyant and catchy numbers have a sense of foreboding and melancholy, and an air-filled hollowness that makes Curtis’s sense of loneliness almost palpable.
Curtis’s voice might take a bit of getting used to. It’s uncomfortably deep and booming in a style probably inspired by David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s ‘German’ periods. But his quavering baritone only serves to highlight the fragility of a man reaching out for company and solace only to realise his own inability to relate to those around him. It’s particularly effective and affecting on the bubbling “Insight”, the simple mantra of ‘I’m not afraid anymore’ both chilling and uplifting. While his voice is often introverted to match the barren, insular nature of much of this dirge-like material, his vocals sometimes reach out, trying to feel something: ANYTHING. It’s there in his desperate pleading of ‘where will it end?’ over choppy, scraping guitars and swelling faux strings in “Day Of The Lords”; and in the slowly building anger of “New Dawn Fades”, his vocals soaring over what is one of the band’s heaviest, sludgiest grooves.
This album is a benchmark in both performance and production, and the use of electronics doesn’t sound outdated now because they are subtle and atmospheric. Okay, I admit the spooky sounds in “Disorder” remind me of Spider-man, and the chattery breaks that act as choruses on “Insight” sound like something from a late-‘70s shoot-em-up game; but these whiffs of cheese don’t detract one little bit. The electronic atmosphere gets no better than on “She’s Lost Control” where Morris’s clattering, reverbed drumming is matched by Hook’s amazingly high ‘n’ dry bass tone to create a desolate groove; while Curtis’s vocals are warped into something strange and haunting, and Sumner’s wonderfully chunky and mean ascending guitar line grinds away, buried in the mix. Sure, Bernie probably won’t be topping any hot-shot guitarist lists anytime soon, but his solo on “Shadowplay” is beautifully simplistic and soulful, and his jagged guitarwork is the essence of post-punk: providing accent and nuance while the rhythm section carries the tunes.
The band’s follow up Closer (1980) and the clutch of singles collected on Substance (1988) are also excellent releases that have cemented the band’s place in the annals of rock history. But for me, Unknown Pleasures is the spark, the smouldering ember to hold in the hand, the cinder that illuminates the dark hallways and helps warm you when the bedroom gets so cold. Unknown Pleasures is absolutely essential, and the sad thing is that these things only become truly clear in hindsight, when
it’s
all
too
little,
too
late…
***
IMAGES
Unknown Pleasures*
* images on this page were taken from the following Wikipedia page:
Unknown Pleasures
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