Joy Division
Unknown Pleasures

THE REVIEW

Suffering is something palpable, it creeps inside you and stays there, hatching its eggs with the intention of remaining. During its easy odyssey, you feel it on your skin as it crawls inside, involving your mind, your organs, your heart, your stomach. Doctors call them psychosomatic pains. Why this suffering? Life foresees them, imposes them. Generally, it's called adolescent malaise, but maybe it's something more, something that drags on for years until adulthood, until thirty and beyond. Ian Curtis never knew. He didn’t want to know. Twenty-three years are too few to know something about life, to know everything. Yet this album, which appears like a definite painting of pain, seems to extend to further fields. It doesn’t talk only about pain. It talks about death, but also about life; it talks about despair, but also about hope; it talks about darkness, but also about light, even if the light seems to disappear (“New Dawn Fades”), and then there comes the natural instinct to annihilate oneself, the will to end it all. The disappointment and monotonous agony over a declining relationship repeatedly appear (“I applied for nothing,” it almost seems like a sad and detached awareness of a dying love). Epilepsy: convulsive bass and guitar sounds, a feverish but determined drum unite in “She’s Lost Control,” there is a growing sense of something that must happen, something that is breaking, because “she’s lost control again,” and the singer knows it could happen to him too. An almost religious vision of pain peeks through, then becomes insistent (“I’ve walked on water, run through fire” “the blood of Christ on their skins”). Esoteric images taking shape through a catacomb voice, a few powerful chords of the instruments: welcome to the funeral ceremony. Twenty-three years too few, but also too many. There is always memory, the recollection to keep us company and a nonexistent future, balanced on a smoke rope. There is always time to “remember when we were young,” to suffer, to brood, to abandon ourselves on the armchair, tired of being tired, with our thoughts that never die. For Ian, there’s no more time. The love is gone.