Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures (1979) Review by P. G. Boccacci

Suffering is something palpable, which creeps inside and there it stops, brooding the eggs, being resolved to stay. During its easy odyssey, you feel it on your skin, creeping inside, it involves your mind, your organs, your heart and stomach. Doctors call them psychosomatic pains. Why this suffering? Life provides for them, imposes them. Generally it gets called malaise among adolescents, but maybe it is something more, something which drag itself for years till you come of age, till your thirty years and over. Ian Curtis never knew it. He didn’t want to do it. 

Twenty-three years are few to know something about life, to know everything. Yet this album, which appears to be well-defined picture of pain, seems to include further fields. It doesn’t talk only about pain. It talks about death and life too; it talks about despair, but also hope; about darkness and light, though light seems to disappear (“New Dawn Fades”), then it comes natural to think about forgetting yourself, about ending it all. 

Let-down and torture, monotonous, for a relationship in eclipse appear more than once (“I campaigned for nothing”, it almost seems a sad and detached consciousness raising about dying love). 

Epilepsy: unrestrained sounds on bass and guitar & feverish drums, played with dynamic bangs, join in “She’s Lost Control”, a growing sense of something going to happen can be felt, something that’s going to break, because “she’s lost control again” and the singer knows it could happen to himself too. 

A quasi-religious concept of pain peeps out, then it gets persistent (“I walked on water, ran through fire” “the blood of Christ on their skins”). Esoteric images which form by a catacomb-like voice, few powerful chords on instruments: welcome to the funeral!

Twenty-three years: too few, but also too many. There’s remembering, the memory to keep company and a non-existent future, hanging in the balance of a rope of smoke. There’s always time to “remember when we were young”, to suffer, to brood, to collapse onto the sofa, tired of being tired, with our thoughts which never die. For Ian there’s no more time. Love lost.