309. Joy Divison, "Closer"

 

What could be more perfect for a gray (here in SF, anyway) Monday morning than Joy Division's Closer, an album so depressing it was released after the singer's suicide with a cover featuring three figures mourning a fourth?

By now, you know the story: Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the band, with the odd, solemn voice, hung himself on May 18, 1980, on the eve of the band's first North American tour.  This, of course, transformed the band from what they likely would have been - a good post-punk band - into a legend.  Not that this album doesn't deserve every accolade it gets!  It's a haunting, moving, genuinely unnerving piece of work.  The instrumentation is sparse, driven by drums, with Curtis' voice floating above it and commanding the scene.  My history of listening to Joy Division started with "this voice is just too weird" and evolved to "I cannot imagine these songs sung by someone else."  

By this point in his life, Curtis was struggling with depression, epilepsy, and the breakup of his marriage, and the lyrics reflect his deteriorating mental condition:

Excessive flashpoints, beyond all reach,
Solitary demands for all I'd like to keep.
Let's take a ride out, see what we can find,
A valueless collection of hopes and past desires.
I never realized the lengths I'd have to go,
All the darkest corners of a sense I didn't know.
Just for one moment I heard somebody call,
Looked beyond the day in hand, there's nothing there at all.

(From "Twenty Four Hours," one of the best/most rocking songs on this album.)  After Curtis' death, the remaining band members, of course, formed New Order, who would go on to surpass the fame of the original band.  But Joy Division will always have a place as long as there are brooding, misunderstood teens, which is forever.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes.

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