From the steady beat of a drum machine that opens the album to the dreary goth nightmare that airs it, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, like it’s Mancunian brother the Fall’s Live At the Witchtrial, is a rejection of the rejection: it is the death of both punk and new wave.
Forty years later, Joy Division’s bassist Peter Hook is playing their first album in its entirety at Irving Plaza this Friday Big news for me and I’ll be there.
So I went back to the album though I have always listened to it quite a bit. Some thoughts.
1. It is a two side experience. Side one opens with “Disorder” where it is meant to and closes with “New Dawn Fades”. Side Two opens with “She’s Lost Control” and the album closes with “I Remember Nothing”.
2. “She Lost control” is as good as you remember. It is so good Grace Jones covered it and Ryan Adams namechecked it. And many bands owe their careers to it.
3. Three songs here are as good as songwriting gets and the rest sound as though they are but they’re not.
4. There is no weaknesses here; it is just a matter of degrees.
5. If you twisted the album by its tail it would fit on DFA records.
6. It isn’t all about Ian Curtis. the drummer is especially awesome, but the lyric sinks you so deep into it… His suicide helps.
7. i don’t know what Hook can do about the vocals…