211. Joy Divison, "Unknown Pleasures"

 


Let's get this out of the way right off the bat:


Were you a mall teen in the 90's or early 00's?  You probably owned this shirt.  It is not, as some people believe, a topographic map of some kind, but rather a stacked plot of the radio emissions of a pulsar, a lonely, dead star sending out sonically interpretable transmissions through the void, much like Joy Division itself.

Was this the first goth album?  The surviving members of Joy Division (i.e., the band New Order, whom we will certainly see) hate the term but probably.  The music is cold and sparse and it sounds like it was recorded in an abandoned castle or a cave of the undead.  And then there is Ian Curtis' voice.  "Weird" doesn't really capture the nuance; it's a baritone-bass, which already sounds Boris Karloff creepy, and he's barely singing, it's more like intoning.  The songs are all funeral chants, but for Ian Curtis' own funeral.

As you might expect, the songs are not exactly cheerful ditties about love and joy.  From "Day of the Lords":

This is the room, the start of it all,
No portrait so fine, only sheets on the wall,
I've seen the nights, filled with bloodsport and pain,
And the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained.

Where will it end? Where will it end?
Where will it end? Where will it end?

Too grim?  How about "Insight":

Tears of sadness for you,
More upheaval for you,
Reflects a moment in time,
A special moment in time,
Yeah we wasted our time,
We didn't really have time,
But we remember when we were young.

You get the idea.  To be perfectly honest, I don't love this album, although I appreciate its enormous influence on everyone from the Pixies to Sonic Youth and so forth.  Interpol was always accused of nicking Joy Divison's sound outright, which probably isn't entirely fair but there's a lot of influence there as well.  If I'm pressed I'd have to say "Disorder" is my favorite song on here, although "She's Lost Control" is probably the best-known.  

This was the only album Joy Division released in Curtis' lifetime, before he killed himself in May 1980.  It's a fitting document to the pain and unrest he must have been feeling.  

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

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