Album Review: "Still" by Joy Division

ian curtis' tombstone
Apr 25 '05 (Updated May 11 '05)

[NOTE:  This article originally appeared at Epinions]

Author's Product Rating
Product Rating: 5.0

Pros
The closest thing to a last will and testament of Manchester's Finest.

Cons
buy it in vinyl - live version of "24 hours" is missing from the CD.

The Bottom Line
If you do not already own a record player, buy one to listen to this on vinyl.

Full Review
as requested, i have reposted the original piece i wrote about the CD version of this album in "General Reviews-Music". my apologies to all for going off topic.

i bought the 2 record set of "STILL" on vinyl when it first came out in 1981. by that time ian curtis was already dead by his own hand. so, perhaps appropriately, my first exposure to the artist's work was posthumous.

i can remember the chilly, uncomfortable feeling i had when the dead soul himself spoke from the speakers over the sonorous, funereal feedback and tribal drums: "...Time for one last ride before the end of it all." i thought punk rock and avant garde music had prepared me for challenging sounds, but hell - was pop music supposed to sound this frightening, this depressing? of course as we have seen, horror and suspense movie soundtracks every year since then have borrowed heavily from the postmodern angularity that reached its apotheosis with the nine singles and twelve live tracks on this 2-disk vinyl headstone.

some of martin hannet's most brilliant production atmospherics are apparent here - one gets the feeling that the songs were recorded on a floating ice berg in the middle of the antarctic, under a sky the color of lead, by people who were or were soon going to be frozen to death. "ice age" has guitar-driven brutality reminiscent of their earliest work, yet the drums sound less like the stereotypical testosterone pummeling of ordinary punk and more like the shudders of a machine breaking down. bernard sumner's guitar solo literally sounds like a bandsaw hitting a piece of metal - you can almost see the sparks flying. it actually hurts. as for the words, "Seen the real atrocities, buried in the sand/Stockpiled safety for a few - we stand holding hands" could have been written today.

on "the sound of music" the bass is heavy, thick, and plodding, far more so than that of larry tolhursts' on the equally seminal "pornography" by the cure, which under steve lillywhite's production sounds stagey by comparison. "pornography" is a technicolor horror film; "STILL" is in black and white, like a haunting bergman melodrama. the drums ring dead and flat as gunshots inside of a garbage dumpster, and the soloing again has a sustained harshness to it truly unheard of in previous music. curtis sings "love - life - don't you feel higher?", repeating the last word over and over again first as a rebuke, then as an outpouring of sheer agony.

i can't really explain why, but "glass" was the one that actually scared the s**t out of me the most. it evoked a black-painted discoteque with flashing white strobe lights populated by flesh eating zombies being electrocuted. this may or may not have been an accurate portrait of manchester in the late 70's. again, i couldn't imagine that music this sincerely horrific could be anybody's party music. of course after that first hearing i was infected and had to hear it "again and again", like an addict who's long since inured to the high, and only in it for the fix.

the next four tracks sustain the feeling in varying textures, but "dead souls" is the climax - riveting, dramatic, astonishing in its power, comparable to the stones' "gimme shelter" or hendrix's "voodoo chile (slight return)" in its devastating portrait of the disintegration of a human soul. the band is jamming here with a rock and roll synchronousness that is achingly tragic in demonstrating the potential lost from curtis' death, but it is as fitting a final statement as any. the recurring theme of curtis' lyrics, fully supported by the band's musical expression - that of the unquiet ghosts of man's historical inhumanity coming back to afflict ensuing generations, that anyone with any sensitivity at all must feel horror at what we are capable of - is brought to a head here. the song rises and then falls with dynamics equal to anything else in the history of rock music. as curtis cries out "they keep calling me!" you can almost hear him joining them, becoming one with the voices. it's hard to imagine any other end to his story, listening to this music.

the live tracks are impactful enough, if only shadows of the studio versions. personally "24 hours", which does not appear on later re-releases [such as the CD], strikes me as the exception. one gets a brief glimpse from the recording something of the tension, terror and drama that fuels the idea of the song that could not truly come to full fruition without an audience present. it would probably make good background music to a Survival Research Labs performance of robot warriors tearing each other apart. when it ends, the cheer of the audience sounds exhausted, the kind of exhaustion one feels coming out of a good horror matinee.

it's tragic that the catharsis one might experience listening to this album was not within ian curtis' reach; that after making a statement like "dead souls" he could not move on to tell other stories of his inner landscape, which was clearly vast. we will have to satisfy ourselves with the imagining of it.





Recommended
Yes

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