Joy Division - Under Review
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C Program: B
I came to
Joy Division late in life. I had recently graduated from the university
and moved into my first apartment with my girlfriend. I worked days at a little bookshop and she
was a newly minted librarian working in the engineering department of a much
more prestigious local school than the one I had attended.
I had
this weird idea that I might be a writer and she encouraged my delusions. After dinner and attending to the dishes I
would shut myself in a tiny backroom we had turned into a makeshift
office. I had set up my typewriter, a
vintage Underwood once owned by my girlfriend’s grandfather, himself an
old-time newspaperman, by the window.
Thus ensconced I would attempt to put something worthwhile on
paper. Mostly, though, I would stare at
the blank sheet for about an hour or two, then give up and watch the street
below for awhile just for a change of pace.
Thinking
about that now, somehow, it’s always a winter streetscape I was looking down
on. In my memory of it it’s always night
and snow is always threatening to fall.
Ice covers everything and the light from the streetlamps looks like
solid shafts of lemon-colored ice. It’s
strange how our memories romanticize things all on their own.
My first
Joy Division record was a gift from my girlfriend. It was a used copy of Unknown Pleasures purchased at the neighborhood indie shop. I listened to it once then set it aside where
it remained pretty much ignored for a year or more.
We broke
up. Of course we broke up. I’m an impossible person on even my best
days. Living with me was not easy. I was mixed up anyway. Not sure who I was, or what I wanted out of
life. Not sure what I wanted from the
person sharing that life and almost entirely incapable of giving that person
what they needed from me. So we broke
up.
Re-enter
Joy Division.
I was
miserable and broke and not writing anything good. I was listening to Nico’s The Marble Index a lot…and enjoying it. That record made sense to me in much the same
way sticking sharp little slivers of wood under my fingernails made sense. If you can’t find a way to make yourself feel
good, then do things that make you feel even worse and just call it feeling good.
But you
can only listen to Nico records for so long.
Eventually you need to hear music with more light in it. So I picked up Unknown Pleasures and it stayed in my CD player for weeks.
Joy
Division’s music may be a world where the sun is in perpetual eclipse, but
Nico’s is a world where there was never even a sun to begin with and therefore
in the land of Nico there is nothing even to hope for, the sun can never
return. Joy Division knew darkness, but
it also understood somewhere there is light.
A
necessary lesson for a broken heart.
And with
this latest installment in the Under
Review series fans can look forward to an education in all things Joy
Division. Coupled with Deborah Curtis’s
excellent memoir of the late Ian Curtis, our hero of the long midnight, it’s
everything a neophyte Joy Division fan needs to know.
The
letterboxed 1.78 X 1 picture and Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo sound are fine, as
are the usual tough quiz and other little bits the series is known for. In all, this is one of the stronger installments
in this strong series.
- Kristofer Collins
Kristofer
Collins is an editor at The New Yinzer and owner of Desolation Row CDs in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can
contact him at:
desolationrowcds@hotmail.com
