Closer - Joy Division

Joy Division’s second and final album “Closer” was posthumously released on July 18th, 1980, two months after the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis. Produced by Martin Hannett, who also produced the band’s debut album “Unknown Pleasures”, its sound has been described as being lusher and more sombre than its predecessor, with more use of synthesizers and studio effects. Many of its songs have a despairing, funeral feel, with its cover art appearing to reflect this, although it was chosen by English graphic designer Peter Saville before he had heard any of the music; both the photo and the bleakness of the music and lyrics amplified the already strong mystique surrounding the album after Curtis’s suicide.
The opening track, “Atrocity Exhibition”, shares its name with “The Atrocity Exhibition” by British author J.G. Ballard, one of Curtis’s favourite books. Several of the songs on “Closer” are dominated by a down-tempo vibe and droning synthesisers, such as the albums’ final two tracks “The Eternal” and “Decades”. The band’s reverberating combination of minor-key lines and Curtis’s tremorous bass voice are grim enough on their own, and the lyrics reveal references to blacker-than-black stories by Ballard and Polish novelist Joseph Conrad. Keyboards are featured predominately on four of the album’s nine tracks, a trend that would follow the remaining members of the band into its later incarnation, New Order. The confessional “Isolation”, “A Means to an End”and “Heart and Soul” paint a picture of ever-growing bleakness; broken dreams and lost love. This peaks with “Twenty Four Hours”, a song of dreams lost to destiny, leading right into a pair of slow, gentle, requiem-like songs; “The Eternal” and “Decades”. The lyrics to “The Eternal” suggest Curtis might have been envisioning his funeral, while “Decades” suggests someone looking back over a life that ended all too soon, a tragedy which befell Curtis a mere two months before this album’s release.
“Closer” is desolate yet hauntingly beautiful. Arguments will more than likely continue until the end of time as to whether it was Joy Division, Bauhaus, or even Siouxsie and the Banshees who first turned punk on its head and in doing so created goth, but by 1980 the movement was clearly visible and “Closer” may just be the first great goth record.
1. “Atrocity Exhibition”
2. “Isolation”
3. “Passover”
4. “Colony”
5. “A Means to an End”
6. “Heart and Soul”
7. “Twenty Four Hours”
8. “The Eternal”
9. “Decades”
Labels: 1980's























