Scanning ahead, it looks to me as if roughly 70% of the rest of 1980’s albums are going to be fairly dark in one way or another. And they don’t get much darker than Joy Division. [Edit from future me: Actually, they're not as bad as I thought].
This one was released a few months after
Ian Curtis’ suicide, and I do wonder if that tragic fact adds something to the
legend of Joy Division because, although they’re relatively novel for the time,
I’m not getting that same sense of awe and wonder at the music that the fans in
the comment sections of the tracks I’m accessing seem to feel. Music is, of
course, entirely subjective. If I went by the comments of others, every track
on every album by every artist would be “the best music ever made”. I’ve yet to
find that, I think.
Curtis is at his most Jim Morrison-sounding
on this album, especially on the track Colony where his deep vocals convey a
great mournful quality – again, how much is perception applied in retrospect?
Like Nick Drake’s Pink Moon which radiates depression but was recorded when
Drake was relatively content between bouts of depression, or Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, which was written
before he was paralysed – a song can sometimes reflect inner darkness, or even
serve to exorcise it and channel it into productivity. You have to feel for Curtis,
though, trapped by his worsening epilepsy – witness the darkness musically and
lyrically in The Eternal, for example.
The tracks are largely based on an ongoing
riff, like krautrock tracks, that have no traditional verse/chorus/middle eight
structure to them but are one thing throughout. Some are based on Bernard
Sumner’s guitar motifs and sound, such as Twenty Four Hours. Others tend
towards more of a synth-based sound, like a darker version of Kraftwerk or
Tangerine Dream – Decades, for example. On the track Heart And Soul, the drum
and bass rhythms are complex and almost, well, drum and bass; the album
certainly feels very prescient in places.
By now, a lot of artists are following Joy
Division in removing as much of the treble sounds from their music as possible
– no, or minimal, cymbals, guitars are steady, often scratchy power chords
endlessly repeated rather than squealy guitar solos. It’s an interesting
divergence that separates the Eighties from the Seventies, but runs the risk of
outlasting its novelty.
Comments
Post a Comment