468. Joy Division - Closer (1980)















Track Listing


1. Atrocity Exhibition
2. Isolation
3. Passover
4. Colony
5. Means To An End
6. Heart And Soul
7. Twenty Four Hours
8. Eternal
9. Decades

Review

There are some bands which could do no wrong and Joy Division was one of those, one of those bands that ended too early to ever have reached the point of being shit. The same is not true of New Order which followed it, but you can see traces of the New Order to come in this album, but restrained enough to make it simply brilliant.

Closer is just as dark as Unknown Pleasures but is more turned towards the synths and stuff, the 80's are here, but the typical 80's elements are so restrained that if anything they enhance the sound. It is difficult to compare this to Unknown Pleasures this is the post-apocalypse of the apocalyptic first album, and this shows that the end of Ian Curtis was more or less inevitable.

Some may say that Joy Division is overrated due to the singer's suicide, but that suicide does retrospectively imbue the music with a certain power, it shows that this was not posing... if only Morrisey had the courage of his convictions.

Track Highlights

1. Twenty Four Hours
2. Atrocity Exhibition
3. Decades
4. The Eternal

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The opening track, "Atrocity Exhibition", shares its name with The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard, a book that Curtis read and loved, but only after writing the bulk of the song. It was ranked 10th on Pitchfork Media's Top 100 Albums of the 1980s, 72nd on NME's 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. Music site Digital Dream Door placed it #30 on their list of the '100 Greatest Alternative Albums'[1].In 2003, the album was ranked number 157 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

The rarest of finds... a not too horrible fan video of Twenty Four Hours: