Album Review - Closer (Joy Division)

Closer is one of those albums that I become infatuated with and then end up desperately seeking something, anything, that can replicate the sound and mood that I get when listening to it. As always, the search seems to be fruitless. There are other post-punk bands and there are other bands that have made gloomy, hopeless music, but Ian Curtis seems to plumb every nuance and shade of misery in the album. He famously hanged himself shortly after its completion and the act seems to haunt every second.

The album starts out with Atrocity Exhibition which begs you to “Step Inside”. The music is sharp and distorted, with a pulsing rhythm section and dueling guitars giving the listener the sense of being right inside the coliseum of nightmares that Curtis imagines. Fame is the obvious target of the track, the modern entertainer is traced back to their roots as a Roman gladiator thrown to the lions. We all love to see them put in a good fight, but at the end the audience isn’t there to see the gladiator win. They’re there to see them torn apart. Hollywood and the music industry is filled with testaments to the fact that we love to see people tortured and humiliated more than we love to see them succeed. Curtis obviously found the music press and touring schedule a bit much on a personal level, but I can’t help but feel as if he’s inviting the listener to the battlefield with lines like “Take my hand and I’ll show you what was and what will be”

Isolation comes next. The song sounds like Devo, if Devo was in dire need of an anti-depressants. I imagine that danceclubs in hell would contain people making jerky movements along to this song, alone and isolated from one another. “Mother I tried to believe me”, the sentiment seems so relatable from his dejected sighs. I have to wonder if Ian Curtis might have thought that this song was a wayward distraction itself.

Passover is next, the song moves along with more of a traditional rocking beat than the previous two tracks but still maintaining the feel of a dirge. Ian Curtis’s voice on this one seems like he’s sighing every lyric out “I know that I’ll lose every … time”. The song seems to be part of a greater context of Curtis’s suicide. We can see that he’s in Passover, the pre-suicidal meditative state. Where crises are known to have come, but we are left wondering if we can go on with this train of events. Passover is traditionally the celebration of the Jews escape from slavery in Egypt, it seems like here, it’s a tenebrous celebration of Curtis’s own freedom from slavery. From his poor marriage (Is this the role that you wanted to live? I was foolish to ask for so much) to the very confines of life itself.

Colony comes next and genuinely rocks in its own gloomy way. It’s about a man leaving his lover and his worried parents and ending up “standing cold here in this colony”. The colony seems to be the afterlife. It provides perhaps some small amount of optimism in the album by showcasing the downside of death. But ultimately, it’s inevitable and “God in his wisdom took you by the hand”.

The first side of the LP version of the album is finished with the song A Means to an End. I’ve talked about Curtis sighing before, but never has he sound more desolate then when he moans “I put my trust in you”. Yet on some level, with its stripped down punkish attitude and vaguely danceable rhythms, the song seems to be a love song. Committed still, I turn to go. You have to wonder who the lover is that Ian Curtis is alluding to. Is it the wife from his troubled marriage? Or is it death itself? The reaper is certainly one person that will never leave your side, one person that you can depend on. I feel that this song almost has two meanings, one when Curtis wrote it as a love letter to death itself when he wrote it, but it takes on a different meaning after his death. He seems to be moaning from the grave with his lamentation of “I put my trust in you”. I feel almost personally responsible as a listener, I suppose that the world was just never good enough for him, but what else could he have put his trust into? The song seems to haunt the listener.

The second side of the LP version of the album is broadens out a bit. We start with the pulsing rhythm of Heart and Soul. Curtis sings near the top of his bass-baritone range here and the effect is mesmerizing and horrifying. “Heart and Soul. One will burn”. One supposes that Ian eventually chose the latter option, his heart burning on our mortal coil was too much to bear. The lyrics couldn’t be more depressing. You almost have the sense that he’s dying during the song. “You take my place in the showdown, I’ll observe with a pitiful eye”. The words of a man who has already died in his own way. “The past is now part of my future” - the line puzzled me for a bit before I realized that the past was the oblivion that we know prior to birth.


Twenty Four Hours comes on with another rocking beat and a sense of acceleration as we head towards the light (or the flames). We found ourselves discovering what permanence is. His voice is deeper here and seems unable to rise above the furtive rhythm in a way that somehow makes complete musical sense. I never fail to get shivers down my spine when he cries “Looked beyond the day in hand, there’s nothing there at all”. We end with him claiming that he’s gotta find his destiny before it gets too late. I wonder if he’s perhaps in purgatory for this part of the album.

We are then taken into the sepulchral drone of The Eternal. The sparse piano flutters over sounds of wind ripping through the world. This is Curtis’s funeral no doubt. “The procession goes on, the shouting is over”. He compares himself to a mentally handicapped child that he once knew who lived his life from childhood to adulthood in the confines of his parents’ small yard as his disability would not allow him to interact with the others in a normal way. “With children my time is so wastefully spent”, a particularly disturbing sentiment given the fact that Curtis had a child, I suppose like most suicidal people he felt as if his daughter’s life would be much better without him in it. The child in the yard sounds an awful lot like a person in a grave, their tombstone allows them to watch the trees and the garden, as the years make them older. He draws on the hopelessness of death in this song. After you’ve died, you can try to cry out, but no one will hear you.

We end with the industrial march of Decades. His voice gets quite deep in this song, but rather than moaning from the grave, it sounds like he’s moaning from the trauma of a long life (decades). The chorus is a haunting “Well where have they been?”. I’m left wondering. It seems to draw some comparison to soldiers in battle with its images of young men with the weight on their shoulders, Curtis must have thought himself on a battlefield I suppose. “We knocked on the doors, of hell’s darker chambers” “Can’t replace the fear or the thrill of the chase”. I suppose that he thought that after the battles of youth, we couldn’t help but grow weary inside and fade away. Perhaps he was right, some people obviously agree with him. I think I’ll take my chances on the battlefield however. That doesn’t mean that I won’t give due respect to the fallen around me.

The problem with art is that people always find it more fascinating post-death. Curtis might have known this which is why he bothered finishing the album before hanging himself and giving it the disturbing title Closer. We are drawn closer to him, but it was his close. One somewhat unique thing that I find about this album is that rather than the manic depression typical of troubled rock stars (Cobain, Phil Ochs, countless others I’m sure), he has unipolar depression - for this album at least. The sheer resignation gives the entire thing a feeling of being the muffled moans from beyond the grave. As depressing as it may be, I find some small comfort in this. It’s easy to ignore the soft crying coming from the corner, but I think that hearing it gives the crier the due respect they deserve. It’s hard to listen to, but I feel myself drawn towards it. I think we’ve all felt hopeless and looked towards death before, I find myself comforted by listening to these lamentations knowing that I am not alone. It’s just too bad that after coming face to face with hell’s darker chambers Ian Curtis decided to drag himself in.

Everything Has A Beginning

Well I'll be damned if I haven't entered the sleazy and self-important world of the blogosphere. I'm mostly intending for this to give me the illusion of an audience for various reviews and opinion articles that I write, rather than as a diary of my life but who knows what I'll end up writing.

If you're perplexed by the title, just look up Cerenkov Radiation.