Watching The Reel As It Comes To A Close (Closer: Remastered & Expanded - Joy Division)

Member Name: DaarkMavis

Product:	Closer: Remastered & Expanded - Joy Division
Date:	17/09/00 (242 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Short, sharp and uncommonly good.

Disadvantages: Very sparse inlay info

This album is probably the most bleak, depressing 45 minutes you will ever experience. It is also the most amazing, life-enhancing 45 minutes you will ever experience. This is not a contradiction and this is not hyperbole.

Kicking off, quite literally, with the brutal 'Atrocity Exhibition', Closer is obviously a different kettle of fish to Joy Division's first LP, the astoundingly graceful Unknown Pleasures. However, before the gloomy tombstone artwork and dark song titles ('Atrocity Exhibition', 'Passover', 'Isolation') cause you to believe that this is another self-indulgent 'goth' album by a tasteless and talentless 'goth' band, think again. True, Joy Division were 'goth', but only in the sense of true gothic mystecism. Far from the Devil Worshipping nature of modern 'goth' and 'industrial' groups (Marilyn Manson, Rammstein), Ian Curtis's gothic vision was of a more savoury, if bleaker, relationship between the love and self-hatred in one's own mind. Drawing on the darker sides of literature (William S Burroughs, JG Ballard and even the Old Testament on disturbingly frequent ocassions) allowed Curtis to, publically at least, distance himself from his words. In truth, the public and private persona of the lead singer had merged into one very ill young man. This final purging of his emotions left us with what has widely been regarded as his public suicide note.

Lyrical meanings aside, the musical style of Closer is very interesting. Here we see the move away from the post-punk of their early recordings, and the adoption of less 'rock' instruments, namely the synthesiser, which was to become the mainstay of New Order's creations. It becomes apparent very quickly just how big an impact on modern music Joy Division really had. Often, the music seems extremely inappropriate for the lyrics, but on further inspection, it blends perfectly (eg the
quasi-disco of Isolation and the drum'n'bass of Heart And Soul). Along the way, though, it incorporates the familiar-sounding Sumner guitar, most prominently on Colony and 24 Hours, which continue with the paranoid and edgy tone of the whole album.

The Eternal is a most fitting title for one of the final songs on Joy Division's last album. Written about a Down's Syndrome child Ian Curits remembered from his childhood, it combines the definitive 'Joy Division' driving drums and bass sound with some excrutiatingly vivid images ('Stood by the gate at the foot of the garden/watching them pass like clouds in the sky'). The overall effect is akin to watching a film-reel in slow motion through frosted glass.

During the final track, the awesome Decades, something truly magnificant happens and the music fan is treated to one of those all-too-rare moments of absolute aural cataclysm, as you find yourself caught up in a nightmare of isolated, distanced emotion as the eerily scraping synths and the bass and drums drive on and on relentlessly and Curtis, trance-like, half-sings, half-proclaims: 'Here are the young men, the weights on their shoulders' before pleading (and he really does seem to be pleading) 'Where have they been?'.

There isn't a duff track on this 9 song album, because in their formative life, Joy Division simply didn't write duff songs. As a testament to the mother band's unique artistic creativity, and as a precurser to the pioneering sounds of New Order, Closer stands as a superb and timeless momento (released in 1980, after Curtis's death).

I'm sorry for the meandering lenght of this review, and that I still haven't succeeded in accurately expressing the contents of Closer. Buy it for yourself, listen to it and I promise that it will change your listening perspectives forever.

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