Closer-Joy Division
-CLOSER . JOY DIVISION-
Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders,
Here are the young men, well where have they been?
We knocked on the doors of hells darker chamber,
Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in,
Watched from the wings as the scenes were replaying,
We saw ourselves now as we never had seen.
Portrayal of the trauma and degeneration,
The sorrows we suffered and never were free.
SIDE A Atrocity Exhibition / Isolation / Passover / Colony / A Means To An End
SIDE B Heart And Soul / Twenty Four Hours / The Eternal / Decades
In the good old days of vinyl records and paper covers there was this forgotten now feature:sides. It can be argued that sides were something like the intermission in the old movie theaters. Some people were annoyed because they had to get up and change side, or because the continuity of the music was thus disrupted by a technicality and the concept divided in two. On the other hand decades of adherence to this division forced many musicians to arrange theri music according to it, and that is especially true for artists like Pink Floyd and the early Genesis where sometimes a song covered one side, although I think probably the first who did it where The Iron Buttefly with "In a gadda da vida".Why all this preamble you might ask. Well Closer is close to a masterpiece. But where it comes even closer, it is the four tracks of the second side.
Joy Division were formed in the dark and rainy industrial Manchester in 1976 and recorded just two albums before transforming into New Order. Closer was the second; it is permeated by the personality of their charismatic, epileptic and depressed singer Ian Curtis. It can be argued that he was the last British romantic, with a deeply pessimistic view of the world. This can in part or in whole find application to a whole range of songwriters that preceded or followed him. But never in the history of British pop came a moment wher music so divine was coupled with the darkest lyrics evr pronounced.
The first side has moments of musical brilliance and the occasional joy as in the bass line and guitar explosion in "A means to an end. Colony and Passover are both well crafted songs with powerful rythm section and a funky (JD funky, don't expect to smile or anything) feeling. But the 20 minutes of the second side can hardly be described. You should always listen to those four songs in succession and in the exact order as they were on the original vinyl: Heart And Soul / Twenty Four Hours / The Eternal / Decades; or better : Agony/Pain/Death/Absolution. Joy Division descended to the depths of the European soul. The songs are beautifully recorded and produced by Martin Hannet. You have to go through all this to find the keyboard lines in the last song. Primitive but brilliant, a rare ray of light in the visible darkness of this record. Ian Curtis never came back from this trip. He died on May 18th 1980, two months before the release of this record.
Weary inside, now our hearts lost forever,
Cant replace the fear, or the thrill of the chase,
Each ritual showed up the door for our wanderings,
Open then shut, then slammed in our face.
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