My Review: Joy Division - Closer

 Joy Division - Closer

‘The greatest pain in the world is that which, drop by drop, pierces the soul and breaks it.’

Francisco Villaespesa

In human history, there are ties that are passed on without direct contact, like a trajectory that swings covertly. In this case we are talking about the Odyssey, the transplant of the most extreme adventures that, in March 1980, in just thirteen days, decided to enter the musical body of a project full of symptoms adjacent to the original, a catastrophic and hallucinatory journey, gliding into the cold clearing of Britannia Low studios, in Islington, London, to deliver us not an idyll but the metre that measures the difference between good and the most extreme ills.

There are 41 kilometres between Salford and Macclesfield, and the four boys shared this distance by travelling to Manchester, the grey dome of existence at its murkiest and most turbulent. The fun lay in escaping reality, creating imaginative islands within an electric circuit of musical notes and extreme paradoxes. The culture of the city was leaving the idleness of the early sixties and in the middle of the seventies was pushing to gain sympathy, favour and star approval. Joy Division were the most obvious break, but they were never thwarted: the Buzzcocks saw their black beauty and welcomed them for a tour during which JD wrote the nine songs that gave Unknown Pleasures a sad record, still alive today, of making a new album that belied much of that attitude but lacked quality.  Closer is a reasoned, devilish, magnetic scream, a magmatic wave of fatigue, introspection, a black-and-white fever that lingers on, without hesitation. It collects the detritus of a soul in disarray, the enthusiastic pulsing of the other three members, young people full of vitamins and hopes, delightful slackers in search of a status that will take them away from this urban agglomeration increasingly at odds with everyday life. The texts, in fact, are a daily diary in which thoughts are not assumed to be artistic manifestations disjointed from reality, but are instead the cast, the imprint, the attitudinal snapshot of a will that is specified in the affirmation of weakness as the limit that cannot be beaten. Nine compositions divided into two sides: the first gravitates within the systematic intention to show inaccessibility, the unpleasant that requires freezing while still managing to make the soul sweat. The second is a mass of thoughts in total decay that are accompanied by gloomy, lapidary music, full of rain and wind, to carry away, in posthumous memory, an absence of energy that resembles a song without the magnets of despair.

Right from the cover, where the religious significance is eliminated (only an arm of the Madonna appears and Jesus of Nazareth is almost totally hidden), we understand that we are before an image that does not summarise the content but rather indicates the departure, the intention, the extreme beauty and intensity of the fascination with death, shown here in the act of proximity, of welcoming, of shedding tears. But JD's second work is not a synthesis of grief, not even a heaven that through exaltation can lead to devotion. It is an account with the scales on one palm and the bewildered gaze on the other, in a dynamic play of forces that can make you lose your co-ordinates. Closer is a roar in the form of a toy with dried cheeks through a surgical Post-Punk that contemplates the assumption of new expressive methodologies. Here, then, in the grooves appear, ‘softly’, the itches of a frightened Coldwave, the first vows of that Darkwave that will take its rightful share of responsibility immediately after the release of this jewel.   There is no shortage of elaborate psychedelia and a propensity to give noise a validity that in industrial music could also cause annoyance. The record, by means of Martin Hannett's cursed ability to achieve that perfection not appreciated by the four of them, mummifies emotion (the spontaneous kind) to generate a mental short circuit in which bewilderment, fear and tension make it all seem like the fruit of a film projection, allowing the horror and the dramatic to coexist, not forced.

Too much has been said about Ian Curtis's suicide, about the will and so much other gratuitous naivety and nonsense: instead, we find ourselves in the territory of unbalanced expressions, ungovernable impulses, joy and sorrow as an inescapable fetter, with the ability to provoke thoughts full of constantly falling blood magnets. Ian talks about himself and does so in front of a microphone: no will knows this dynamic...

We are supposed to think how for once the music was disinterested in the lyrics and that only a magical conjunction could make one believe in a connection between the two. But Bernard, Peter and Stephen at that time did not even listen to the singing of the poor boy divided and atrophied by spasms. After forty-four years it can be argued that this was a good thing, a mind-boggling coincidence. 

The themes addressed in the record are spectral circumnavigations, with fatigue glued to the lack of all hope, a polishing of death by extinguishing life, depositing dreams in the vault where all interest could not mature. Erect, weedy, electric and powerful, a slow anvil with accelerations that precede the long procession leading into the zone of silence that can deliver the truth. The tracks are united only by the fact that the musicians and the vocals are perfectly recognisable: for the rest, it is an avalanche that disrupts every harmony and the delicacy dies second by second, snuffing out dreams and ambitions to conquer a hermitage called Masterpiece, the one that makes no one happy, the saddest one imaginable…  Everything in this modern getsemani is heading towards unpleasantness and the impending clash between the desire to hear how it goes and the absolute will to turn off every transistor.

And there are still people who call this work ‘dark’...

The delicate glass of this latest creation is nothing more than a circus where the clown does not come out, he shows his trick through Chinese shadows, and the horses, the usually untamed ones, here sit and have their manes combed by the frozen tears of Ian, the unintended protagonist of a lacerating solo, verse after verse. The atmosphere, leaden and vibrant, often leads to annoyance, to the reaction of souls who would like to deny the true identity of a stomach-churning listen. Rituals, ideals, dispersions, clashes, from Punk's ‘No Future’ to ‘I'm fucked’: it seems like so many years have passed, but no, with this jewel Joy Division show how any impetus can lose its fury and find the slime of increasingly conscious and capable friction. It is shocking that the band forgets the poetry of methodical Post-Punk, made up of literary references from the late 19th century, to become the outpost of a series of furious introspective analyses: perhaps this is precisely why the genre definition for Closer loses its value, as we are catapulted onto a couch discovering that a psychiatrist struggles to gather information.  It happens with words as with music: the song form, only apparently, helps to believe that madness is not a spring that takes life and makes it bounce neatly. It is exactly the opposite and this is where the difficult management of arthrosis, arthritis and degenerations that seem to fall into the lake of discontent begins. 

One has to identify the zones of belonging, those of rejection, those in which the band clashes with itself, with the producer, with time, which does not seem able to accept that these children do not watch over the real, but instead decide to position themselves on the tail end of time to say goodbye. Everything dies in these nine songs, no hypothesis of copy and paste, of a reproduction or a continuation, because the true masterpiece is the one in which its own sense, its own space, in the mysterious location that makes no one comfortable, is an unattainable archive even for the future.

Closer, from the initial sensory earthquake, becomes a galaxy in continuous explosion, amidst tribal rhythms, boiling genetic circles and the demagnetisation of all trust. One cannot and should not like this set of tensions, but they must be swollen teachers with dubious diopters because, perhaps, the first gain of this work is precisely to give sight as little importance as possible. And so it is that the auditory apparatus finds itself succumbing, unable to cope with these non-songs, these disharmonies, out-of-tune, anxieties, apprehensions and cadaverous sounds that bury every smile.

It has a temporal collocation discoloured by the lack of knowledge and memory on the part of those who did not know those years, lived them, desired them: many albums from 1980 are lysed, punctured, thinned blankets, and if this one has resisted it is only apparently because of a link with the tragedy.

Now it is time to descend into the aisles of these compositions to give awareness a decisive uppercut, for nothing is granted to the listener but to have a nearby void into which to throw oneself...

Song by Song

1 - Atrocity Exhibition

With a tribal beginning from which the Cure would take a lot, we enter the zone of non-melody, of a continuous psychedelic infiltration that is counterbalanced by Ian's singing, the only one capable of painting a subtle harmonic line. But it is a riot of sounds, sabre-rattling, with the bass that seems to join the funk to slow down the acid vein of Bernard's guitar approach, while Stephen puts ice in the veins for an unintended homogeneity with the singer's words. A nerve-wracking, lengthy beginning that immediately makes things clear: Closer will not be the party of well-combed senses...

2 - Isolation

Unknown Pleasures appears only for the neurosis-filled bass and drumming, for the rest we feel the presence of a synth that throws the band into a new zone and perspective: preceding the temple of music with an exaggerated display of mute expressions in circumspect display. It seems to put doses of cheerfulness in that keyboard but, instead, the song is a splendid contortion, in the precipice of a loneliness that advances and demands attention. It dances like robots on loan from Suicide, rather highlighting the boundaries of a rock in the process of excursion.

3 - Passover

The autonomy of intention, when impregnated by blackish certainties, is supported by hinted and sharp guitars, an almost hidden bass, a simple but military drumming, until an evolution is discovered that will generate, in Bernard's arpeggio, a new musical genre of which The Sisters Of Mercy will be the first disciples. Ian is a calculating diviner, ruthless, surgical, never impulsive, he holds back the catastrophe of the verses in a singing that only seems to be devoid of all emotion. A song that shows the creaking of the soul and a capacity of the music for constant alarms, the unwillingness to find a moment when the song can know different heights. Mysterious, diluting in each of its movements the desire to live...

4 - Colony

The glam attack, then off, after a few seconds, into the territories of Killing Joke, where the nervousness passes through the cables, the rolls and oscillations of an epileptic guitar...

Roaring, exhausting, a progression of cuts on the skin and the feeling of a gem that wants to hide...

5 - A Means to an End

The future only knows itself after death: this ballistic miracle sweeps away the history of Post-Punk, of all preemptive doctrine, to open stupor and stiffen nerves. It invites the dance to remain tied up like a mental prostitute, to generate delirium and various illusions. The first moment of a skeletal construction of future New Order appears as a decaying rainbow, measuring things, impulses, relying on a guitar that seems to be a child of the Banshees' Scream album. But Hook's bass is the real mantra, the one that hypnotises before Ian's baritone singing seizes our souls for eternity....

6 - Heart and Soul

A life, excesses, extremes, magnets, turmoil and obedience to a destiny to be hastily written absorb the entire composition with an almost sweet, perfectly tuned, almost powerful, utterly devastating singing, within an architecture that does not linger but finds the method to structure everything in a few movements until giving, in the finale, the impression of a voluntary abandonment to itself. Everything is hinted at, measured, skeletonised, cooled, placed in the cellar of decisions that wear out the nerves, annihilating them...

7 - Twenty Four Hours

The manifesto and apotheosis of a twisting of muscles finds the Post-Punk drive within bacilli and viruses that make listening a free-falling sky, without footholds. Magnetic, dark, devastating, it entrusts the musical trio with the task of drawing tears, while it is up to Ian to illuminate the existential disaster, in an epilogue that shatters every dream. The voice, cleverly illuminated by the obscene dust of an arctic village, renders all joy useless, with the embarrassment of a listening that could, alone, break every breath...

8 - The Eternal

Martin Hannett writes his epitaph with the Manchester band, lending his class to a song that is nothing more than a procession measured by the minimalism of a piano that touches the tears bringing them inside Ian's words, to give this stage the smell of intellectual and physical rubble, in a floral abandon that enchants though paralyses. We enter the intimate, the normally inaccessible places of a soul in quarrel with itself, where the evident fracture is mirrored in the theatricality of dark, greedy atmospheres. Music dies through a gloomy spectre bouncing in the drizzling voice that annihilates weeping. Nothing like it had ever appeared before and it will not find the future sighing for a sequel: the track is a procession that goes beyond definitions as it is embedded in a cloud that dissolves second by second...

9 - Decades

The last petal is synthetic, a keyboard that seems to come out of a black-and-white video game, a progressive and lacerating consumption of all vitality enters the graveyard of dreams to synchronise youth with the old age of every will, in the exhausting decadence of an existence that erases every snap. A keyboard solo leads Ian to pose a question that puts absence on the throne, head down, in a space where every breath into the microphone becomes a syncopated cry that does nothing but pronounce an obligatory sentence, leaving the heart in its damnation. Dry, like an acrylic palette without pulses, the song enhances the mood of the album and embraces the band in its farewell: there is no goodbye when history has decided that this work will be unique for posterity, with the imposition that nothing will have to resemble it...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

9th May 2024