by Conor Lochrie (@conornoconnor)
There’s a repeated line in W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘Easter 1916’: A terrible beauty is born. This devastating line could describe the feeling of listening to Joy Division’s Closer for the first time. It’s a colossal work of art; a post-punk pillar; an ingenious sonic landscape; a blinding existential vision of songwriting. Closer was upon its release - and remains so now - one of the truly masterful records. It’s leading creator, though, wouldn’t live to see its birth. Ian Curtis committed suicide two months before the album was released and in the dark but enlightened aftermath, the lyrical ennui and deadening atmospherics of Closer became truer to life than anyone dared to imagine. A terrible beauty is born.
It’s now 40 years since Closer was first released in 1980 and to mark the milestone Rhino Records reissued the album. The clear vinyl pressing will become a collector’s item for ardent Joy Division fans but the occasion of the reissue also allows for the opportunity to remind oneself of the timelessness and quality of their music.
Closer depressively - with hindsight - feels like a suicide note put to music (the same feeling is awfully evident on David Berman’s wonderful 2019 Purple Mountains album, which was released one month before his own suicide). The connection between Curtis’ sad demise and the lyrics is impossible to ignore. The album burns with distress and foreboding, the songs seeming to drag us deeper into the depths of Curtis’ despairing mind, as we bear witness to his tortured words.
There can barely be a more uneasy entering into an album than “Atrocity Exhibition”: its incessant drum beat sounds like a war march to the inevitable end as Curtis repeats “This is the way, step inside”. So we do. When recording the album, Curtis knew that things couldn’t continue as they were. The band were on a swiftly-rising trajectory, with a tour of the U.S. with the Buzzcocks booked, his marriage was falling apart, and his epilepsy was growing worse, worryingly so. It makes the words on the menacing “Passover” sound sadly prescient: “This is a crisis I knew had to come / Destroying the balance I’d kept”. The last verse of “Twenty Four Hours” contains the heartbreaking lines, “Now that I've realized how it's all gone wrong / Gotta find some therapy, this treatment takes too long / Deep in the heart of where sympathy held sway / Gotta find my destiny, before it gets too late”.
Curtis remains eternally magnetic, even on record: to hear his low, prowling delivery is to immediately conjure the image of his spasmodic, idiosyncratic dance, his eyes intensely focusing on an unseen nothing far above the audience’s eyes. If it’s true, as Bernard Sumner has claimed, that they were really unaware of the extent of the issues with Curtis’ mental welfare, his bandmates certainly produced an eerily evocative instrumental correspondence. “Colony” revels in its haunted post-punk creation, its angular guitars slashing around Stephen Morris’ caustic drumming. Curtis is at his quietest on “Heart And Soul,” a minimal instrumentation masterwork, Peter Hook’s dangerous bassline clashing with the controlled drum beat.
The maligned Martin Hannett’s production was more complex than his work on their debut album Unknown Pleasures, more intentionally claustrophobic and confrontational. Closer was more of a whole piece than the looser Unknown Pleasures. The songs were slower, coldly meditative, intentionally repetitive; ascetic over aesthetic. Everything was austere, harsh. (The band still knew how to cut a groove, it should be noted: “Isolation,” for example, really sounds like a precursor to Hook and Sumner’s New Order stylings, an icy disco mix infused with the borrowed synthesizers of Kraftwerk).
If “Atrocity Exhibition” was the brutal war march, “The Eternal” is Joy Division’s solemn funeral procession. For six minutes we follow them down a path both chilling and transcendent. The drums are tight and ominous, the words measured and distressingly bleak (“possessed by a fury that burns from inside”). In its slow pace, the song evokes the black moods that both emo and post-rock would go on to convey. “Decades” is the ghostly climax, driven to the end by its dark synths. “Here are the young men, the weight on their shoulders / Here are the young men, well where have they been?” Curtis was 23 at the time of his death. Here are the young men. The weight on their shoulders. His words don’t get any easier to hear 40 years later. A terrible beauty was born; Joy Division’s music is the result and long may it live on.