Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division
Album 60: Unknown Pleasures – Joy Division
Closer may be Joy Division’s deepest statement, but this is them at their most honest. Enter post-punk.
Ian Curtis
Ian Curtis is a terrifying ghost. The older I get, the more terrifying his ghost becomes. His haunting vocals that always seem to be staring the void in the face, unable to look past the chaos, only able to see the anemic miasma of death, and pain, and sorrow. It scares me.
This album is restrained compared to its successor. There is a sense of momentum. Tracks like “Disorder” have the feeling of a train that’s been broken, heading toward destruction with the euphoric high of the damned. The guitar has never felt so intentionally jagged and broken. Arpeggios make no attempt to breathe themselves to life, allowing the bass to carry the tune. The drums hurt the ears with their shrieking caterwauling.
It reminds me of Beatrice.
If you’ve read this long enough, you may have noted her absence. That’s intentional. I’ve made efforts to forget her. And I can’t. It feels like the keyboards on this record, which swallow the guitar and drums in whirlpool. Like the title, it reminds me of a gap within me. A void that I see daily.
Less literally, it was listening to this record that I realized she mattered. Until this record she was a pleasant afterthought.
This record conjures up a lot of dark juju. Curtis’s monotone is that hard-line sorrow that’s jumped off the rail and let resignation seep in through the blackened cracks. Theirdespair is as cavernous as it is black. The turns are terrors and the light shines like a joke. The compositions take left turns for no reason. They abandon logic. They sadly embrace chaos. It worksits way inside me to parts I can’t forget.
I can’t untie her from this record and It enhances the experience, perversely.
This album is about darkness. It sparked not only the genre of post-punk, which is punk’s artistic reaction to itself, but fell into it. This album is void and chaos, and it reminds me of personal darkness and absence. Even the title is an uncertainty. An unknowable.
This album is about darkness. It sparked not only the genre of post-punk, which is punk’s artistic reaction to itself, but fell into it. This album is void and chaos, and it reminds me of personal darkness and absence. Even the title is an uncertainty. An unknowable.
And I’m ok with it.
Unlike Closer, which is too despairing to sit through and survive, there is ambiguity to the emotions of this record, you can pull out goodness.
In the last year, I’ve seen the void, I’ve seen the chaos, and I embrace it. I accept it into me, as part of me. I don’t despair over it. I just fall into it and watch the world spin around it. It is a part of life. It is not bad. In this way, my love grows, and my comfortability with myself expands. The unknown is a part of me, just as it is you. It just is, and it pushes me forward.
Curtis & Co. awaken the despair I used to indulge in, reminding me that Beatrice is a void and scar. They remind me that all things are relative. And that abyss isn’t always a bad thing.
Sometimes, it’s just the promise of a different tomorrow.
Until new dawn fades.
