JOY DIVISION
'Still' (Factory) Import
'Amsterdam-Live' (Factory) US
NEW ORDER
'Movement' (Factory) Import
(This review dates from the December 1981 issue of Waste Paper, a fanzine put out by Wax Trax Records in Denver.)
The relics continue to collect at the shrine, an ankle bone here, a left elbow there, a shank of bone, a hank of hair... and presto, instant mythography. It will be years before we will be able to put into proper perspective Ian Curtis and his now deified Music and Death (not necessarily listed in order of importance). Deconstructing the myth and deflating the hagiography would amount to heresy in some corners. Undoubtedly a backlash will form somewhere and sometime that will attempt to dismiss the group in as obvious and false a manner as they have been elevated to infallibility by others.
STILL is a collection of demo tapes and live cuts. While it does not have the raw power and immediacy of WARSAW, previous collection of demo tapes, it is a fascinating document of a band in the throes of growing pains. Moving beyond the constrictions of the dark and
desperate visions expressed in UNKNOWN PLEASURES and CLOSER, the band was trying to find a corridor outward into a more spacious and open music. Even in these unrealized and at times unsuccessful efforts the intelligence and passion shines through. Joy Division never set any but the highest goals: a music that wrenched the listener into new realms of experience. The risks are awesome: the rewards exhilarating and cathartic: the failure heartbreaking.
If with STILL we could see the attempt to break open the form and embrace a wider, more profound experience of life, with AMSTERDAM-LIVE we return again to the dark enclosures of a near psychotic music saturated with anxiety, fear, desperation, need and the covalencies of power and risk, determination and hesitancy, terror and joy. This album is truly an archeology of rage, an excavation inward and downward toward that labyrinthine darkness that rests like cancer in the heart. In 'The Atrocity Exhibition' the refrain THIS IS THE WAY / STEP INSIDE chills the blood as both warning and invitation, knowledge and obsession, repulsion and fascination.
The experience of this music, though, is not depressing or pessimistic. Its concerns are certainly grim, even harrowing. But the act of performance, of song, creates a transcendence and catharsis wherein the listener becomes participant.
It is performance lifted into creation, song into ritual. THIS IS THE WAY / STEP INSIDE / CATHEDRAL OR SLAUGHTERHOUSE / HOME OF HELL / SHELFTER OR ASYLUM. The interchangeable nomenclature of a complex entry into a fallen world. THIS IS THE WAY / STEP INSIDE.
After singer Ian Curtis' suicide a year and a half ago, the band determined to stay together. They also chose not to replace Curtis with another singer. Death, of course, transfigured the band, raising their already considerable status as a cult band to that of virtual ascension toward deification. The band made two further decisions: 1) they changed the name to New Order, a brave attempt at warning their public that things change, become different; and 2) they kept a low profile, playing rarely and releasing only two singles in the years and half before the release of the LP.
The vacuum which nature and a voracious public abhor, however, was filled with the belated release of CLOSER and the constant exhuming of out-takes, demo tapes and legitimately and clandestinely recorded live material. New Order remained in seclusion, mystery and expectation condensing into an aura about them. The very things they hoped to avoid simply found new or alternate paths to fulfillment. The anticipation of New Order's first LP approached the excitement accorded news of the Second Coming.
Well, it is here: New Order: MOVEMENT, Factory 50, 1981, with production by Martin Hannett, well known midwife to the birth of Genius, and cover by Peter Saville whose handiwork graces the vinyl of the truly Important.
This time the product is neither Genius nor Important. It is, however, good, with a small "g." It may even be very good, but it is so hard to sort out the reactions. As one would expect, the music is the best element -- instrumentation, after all, was left intact by Curtis' death. The sound is clean, gorgeous, soaring, and powerful. It has the hard, edgy rhythms pulsing beneath the storm and swirl of guitar and synth that seemed to be the direction that the band was taking with "Love Will Tear Us Apart."
It is the vocals that show forth the limitations of the band: gloomy, inflectionless, with little range, passion or power. They congeal like patina of grease about the boing cauldron of the music. And while both music and voice take themselves too seriously, the singing is the most obvious culprit.
All in all, it almost works. This sounds suspiciously like damning with faint praise, which is unfortunate but partially true. Let me close: this is a good album, a good beginning. The band has made difficult decisions and stuck by them with courage and grace. Out of tragedy they have attempted to create more music, their own music. As they progress, that music too will progress.
******************
Joy Division: 'Dead Souls' from 'Still'
*****
Joy Division live in Amsterdam, January 11, 1980
*****
Bonus:
Warsaw (Joy Division): 'Interzone' Demo
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