Joy Division
Closer

THE REVIEW

I realize there are already a thousand other reviews of this album, purists may turn up their noses, but this one is written by yours truly for therapeutic purposes.

The day arrives when you lose a point of reference.

And this doesn't necessarily mean a bereavement, but rather a figure you took for granted in your days and that suddenly is no longer there.

By an ineffable twist of fate, this happens in a delicate moment, a time of future choices and a moment in which the vast majority of the population awakens drowsy with the first faint tastes of spring.

I cannot stay indoors, so I decide to grab my walkman (yes, my friends still tease me about this, and rightly so) with an old cassette tape given to me by my cousin, side A, side B, Joy Division "Closer."

It was an instinctive gesture, it's a period when I enjoy rediscovering the feats of early Litfiba and the first offerings of local bands like Diaframma, perhaps that's why I opted for the cassette of the Manchester band, or maybe also because I had an absolute need for empathy with the emptiness I felt inside at that moment.

And my memory suggested that the emptiness inside and behind the tracks of "Closer" could give me the empathy and help I needed.

So I find myself in the twilight of a mild March day walking like an idiot alone through the paths of my city's park, smoking cigarette after cigarette while the 44 minutes of the album play uninterrupted.

I was more captivated than ever by the excellence of the work.

A succession of masterpieces one after the other, a catharsis that, as we all know, ended in tragedy for Ian Curtis.

My thoughts overlap between Hook's pulsating bass and Sumner's sparse guitar, and the void behind the sounds I possess and make my own as I listen to Ian's sometimes martial and sometimes lascivious ranting.

Thank God mine isn't an existential ordeal like Ian's but just a moment of great difficulty that any of us may go through in life.

As I walk immersed in my thoughts, three things attract an astonishing amount of my attention and capture me inexorably.

"Twenty Four Hours," heartbreaking; you feel the man fighting with his last moral strength, trying in vain not to give up, an inexorable conflict of accelerations and decelerations with a bass heavy as only a heart can be, going mad and then calming in a convulsive hysteria.

A friend of mine played it on the piano a couple of years ago during my "Joy Division" phase, it was a minimal and stunning version that exuded the true essence; there are a couple of piano versions on YouTube, but they don't bring me back to my memory of that moment.

"The Eternal," well what can I say, "scattering flower washed by the rain" here Ian had decidedly stopped fighting, his self is just a conduit for his last thoughts, almost entirely impersonal.

"There are no words that can explain, no actions that can clarify" "just watching the trees and the falling leaves" his third-person crooning at this point makes me shiver and I have a start; I really look around me and see that the trees indeed have no leaves yet, so I think "but what's all the fuss about nineteen, twenty degrees" spring arriving here and there and then in a medium-sized park the trees are still bare like skeletons?”

It's a detail that struck me a lot and made me quite uneasy to compare in my mind the triumphant sun I woke up to just a couple of days ago with the dryness of those bare and precarious trees.

By now I have completely lost track of time and it's dark, it must be dinnertime I thought, but I don't feel hungry, the organ of "Decades" starts, "here are the young, the burden on their shoulders, here are the young, well where have they been?", I thought of Ian, I thought of how hard it must have been with his inner and psychophysical disaster to look his daughter in the eyes and see in her face the traits of defeat that Ian saw on everyone and in everything.

Ian was "Weary inside," a man exhausted inside.

I also encounter a couple of children on bicycles, and if by chance you empathize with Ian with the final loop of the synths of "Decades" in your earbuds, I assure you a couple of shivers run down your arms.

The work ends and leaves me speechless.

I'm still in the park and remain with the silence in the headphones.

It feels like the natural extension of the album.