Joy Division
Unknown Pleasures

THE REVIEW

There are few albums I have heard that, like this one, have the intensity and the effect of the despairing abandonment with which one takes the last alcoholic sip before collapsing prey to the ghosts of the mind.
One becomes attached to it immediately, almost with the naive and instinctive disposition of an adolescent, or of someone who suffers and endures, without almost knowing why, in search of an identity, a name for their own inner discomfort.

It may be because of that debut as desperate as it is captivating from the first track, the splendid "Disorder", which somehow recalls the dark and incomprehensible chasms/needs of adolescence ("I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand..."), where you feel that never quenched teenage desire to be taken by the hand and to feel guided and wanted by someone as you are and Ian Curtis's existential restlessness, all his personal drama.

If you remember the Eighties from having lived them as a teenager ("But I remember, when we were young..."), listening to the sounds of "Unknown Pleasures" (1979) brings back images of alternative parties in some basement, smudged lipsticks, black kohl, and purple nail polish, dark atmospheres, you getting dizzy alone in a corner (and in the background, perhaps, "She Lost Control" was playing), the memory of drunken dawns on the street amidst others' boisterous ruckus and you thinking you had never felt so alone and misunderstood ("We'll share a drink and step outside / An angry voice and one who cried...").

Ian Curtis almost doesn't sing, he "is", he screams, he declares himself and his clear torment in a desperate and raw way, yet at the same time so intensely, damnably human. Now peremptory and solemn, now disheartened and lacerating, he becomes a clear-eyed prophet of the impossibility of realizing one's most intimate hopes and the nullifying of every expectation in an unresolved knot of disillusionment and defeat.

There is no need to highlight one song over another. This album is an absolute existential journey, where every step is necessary, in a continuum between despair and anger, between pain and bitterness.
The music, cutting and sharp, accompanies almost as a spectator this journey, unfolding in a dark, disturbing play of violent lights and shadows. It mercilessly strips the words and doesn't wrap them, evokes silence without providing answers to primary questions, which resonate darkly like the echo of distress signals sent into the void.
Some passages from this album's songs stay with you, marking you like furrows (in this sense, the splendid, now historic, cover by Peter Saville becomes an illustrated filigree of the emotions gifted by the album): from the pressing "Where will it end?" of "Day of the Lords" to the dark "We were strangers / we were strangers / away too long" of "I Remember Nothing", up to the obsessive "I tried to get to you" of "Candidate", often repeated like an alienating and corrosive drip.

A masterpiece album, the first effort of a band that became legend, and that pervades inside and digs like few others, vibrating to the last with rare intensity and energy.
Anyone who knows how to look inside themselves and has at least once managed to glimpse the shadows of the pain of living cannot disregard it and belong to it.