Joy Division
Closer

THE REVIEW

Talking about a masterpiece like this is really difficult... I admit it; then many will have read my review on ‘Unknown Pleasures’, so they are probably wondering how the hell can this person review ‘Closer’? To be honest, I don’t even know, but... I’ll try

I listened to this album for the first time in 2004... I was struck by it; like many other fifteen-year-olds, I was going through my existential crisis, and, as happens during such crisis, not only did I not see the light, I couldn't even "glimpse" it, feel it, even if distant, perceive it; I only sensed darkness around me... You can therefore imagine what effect this album may have had on me... it practically heightened my apathy towards life. So, after listening to it all, for the first time, I fell asleep... I didn’t have dreams or nightmares or at least I can’t remember... but I recall feeling very cold (outside and inside the room it was at least 30 degrees) and above all, I had in my head that melody, that funeral march, that damned, dark omen of death...

It's in this way that the "old" Ian leaves us: "No words could explain, no actions determine,
Just watching the trees and the leaves as they fall" (The Eternal)

'Closer' is a truly difficult album to classify, but probably not to understand; we could quickly classify it like its predecessor: dark-punk; needless to say, I disagree... I personally prefer to classify it as dark, just dark and nothing more. What leads me to this statement is the atmosphere that pervades the songs: it, despite not being very far from the "obsessive rhythms" and violent atmospheres of 'Unknown Pleasures', in my opinion, becomes more rarefied, almost ethereal, intangible... sure 'Atrocity Exhibition' is very close to 'Unknown Pleasures' but the pain and the sense of "closed" seem to have something claustrophobic, suffocating... such sensation wasn’t there in "Unknown Pleasures." It's already clear then that this is one of the cardinal points of "Closer": this time there is no escape, this time you can no longer escape death...

Ian is aware of his sad destiny... he doesn't even try to fight his "great disease" as he himself defined it, rather he accepts it. "Isolation"... this song shocked me; what struck me is the incredible contradiction that characterizes it: music sharp and soft at the same time, clear and poisonous voice... this "poetry" is, for me, built in the opposition of happy-sad (music-text)... here too I attribute to such opposites the meaning of "awareness," in fact, if we analyzed this "state of mind" (let’s define it that way...) we could say that when you are aware of something "bad" you are happy and sad at the same time: happy for having accepted what's awaiting, sad because it is "something bad". Obviously, this is my interpretation of this song, when taking the text at face value one immediately thinks of isolation and what it entails... continuing our journey in discovering "Closer," we come across "Passover", "Colony" and "A Means To An End", beautiful songs that only pull you down even more and give you more and more that sensation, or rather, that bad feeling of what is about to happen...

Sorry if I don’t describe them and if I’m rushing, but I want to get to the point: "Heart And Soul, 24 Hours, The Eternal, Decades".

These four songs are the most beautiful that the "dark sensitivity" of a man could have ever produced... I would like to describe them in-depth, unravel them, but sorry, I can’t... I will focus on a phrase and a song: 'heart and soul one will burn...' (phrase from "Heart And Soul") and the song "The Eternal".

The phrase is, in my opinion, one of Ian's most significant, painful, and resigning... I don’t know what he actually wanted to say (maybe I missed an interview or maybe Ian never said it...) but I’ll give you my interpretation: it "is" Ian Curtis’s lucidity in front of his destiny... here it goes beyond simple awareness, here he has the perception, or even the vision of what's about to happen: after all, in the end, Ian decided to burn his heart, but the soul is still here... it lives in these songs... Then there is "The Eternal"... I talked about it at the beginning. It’s a funeral march, accompanying Ian Curtis on his last journey... the sounds always darker and the particularly cadenced rhythm as if to mark every step, every whisper, on that damned rainy and dark foggy day (it’s this weather I think of every time I listen to it...) when the heart is now definitively burned...

I know well that this is not actually a review... more than anything, they are thoughts and impressions, in my opinion, however, sometimes it’s needed, you decide... I think it's easier to list genres and associate bands with other bands (joy division-cure of pornography (?)... etc.) showing one’s musical culture rather than trying in some way to describe what one actually feels...