Editorial Review:Amazon.com:In retrospect, the second and final album by this Manchester postpunk band seems to point straight at singer Ian Curtis's suicide, which happened a few months before it was released. The band's reverberating mesh of minor-key lines and Curtis's tremorous bass voice are doomy enough on their own, and attention to the words reveals references to blacker-than-black stories by J.G. Ballard and Joseph Conrad; the void and its terrors were splitting Curtis apart from the inside. 'I put my trust in you,' he sings, and his voice leaves no doubt that that trust has been betrayed. But the music, grim and powerful as it is, points to the direction the surviving members took as New Order, incorporating the mechanical gravity of club rhythms.
--Douglas Wolk
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Disc 1:- Atrocity Exhibition
- Isolation
- Passover
- Colony
- A Means to an End
- Heart and Soul
- Twenty Four Hours
- The Eternal
- Decades
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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'Leaders of Men'
Still sounding years ahead of its time, `Closer' has a reputation for coldness, for despair and for grim Northern doom-and-gloom, but I don't hear anything like that. I hear tough, life-affirming, FIERCE rock music, and while there's not much in the way of fun to be had here, it's not obligatory to have to take it so seriously.
The songs are (mostly) reflective and searching, but none of them are `dirges'. You could even dance to a couple of them, although you might struggle, knowing what happened just a few short weeks after it's completion.
Martin Hannett's production is excellent, giving each song a clear and clean-ness, which allows every detailed lyric to bite home, to reach every nook and cranny of your psyche. In every sense we must participate in the pain, but we know that ultimately, by suffering it, this music (and very few others) breathes victory into our lives. It's beauty cannot bring anything but positives to our existence.
A lot has been written about 'Closer' in an attempt to mystify and mythify it, most of it gleefully encouraged by Tony Wilson and co at Factory Records, and while I'm not going to de-bunk all that, you should really take it all with a pinch of salt, for what it is. A (brilliantly successful!) marketing ploy.
Which is not to say 'Closer' is meaningless, devoid of point. Far from it. It means more to me, and a lot of other people, than I can possibly describe in a few short (admittedly brilliant!) paragraphs.
A big part of my life (still...sorry.), and always will be, 'Closer' is a true great, not stained in any way by the decades (sorry again.) of hyperbole which have followed it around.
Buy it twice.
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(4.5 stars) Depression never sounded so good. Love the cover art, too
First, picture The Doors. Then, picture the Talking Heads under the direction of Brian Eno. Then, mix 'em up. So here's what you get: a lot of insane guitar and synthesizer effects; weirdly dancey rhythms; black-as-night lyrics; and doomy baritone vocals intoning pitch-black lyrics (the fantastic opener "Atrocity Exhibition", with an unforgettable "This is the way, step inside!" refrain and awesomely dark lyrics). And random experiments with tape loops sometimes (the new wave from Hell "Isolation"). The album has a cold, mechanical feel that I would hate if not for two reasons: the group likes to experiment, and I'm all for that; and Ian Curtis' haunting, Lizard King-like baritone has a chilling type of resonance to it. Hell, "Passover" sounds almost like '80s pop, albeit '80s pop crossed with post-punk and Goth. And I love that one, too! Besides the obvious Ian Curtis factor, the guitar parts are amazing. And the groove is, too. Don't forget the groove. Anyway, there's even an industrial song here, and while I'm generally not into industrial, again, there's the Ian Curtis factor! That song, by the way, is "Colony", which perfectly fits in with Joy Division's overarching "depressing-as-hell" mood. Yeah, the Curtis factor improves even weaker songs like "A Means to an End", which has that great, "I put my trust in you!" refrain. I haven't really talked much about the non-Ian Curtis members of Joy Division, but they give a great creepy performance to "Heart and Soul", which really sounds like a post-punk Doors. Okay, so you've heard all about the group's influences, but who did they actually influence? "Twenty-Four Hours" isn't really a great song, but it does have a proto-U2 sound, so at least it was influential. Just kind of boring, other than in the surging instrumental sections, which just so happen to be the most U2-ish of the song. The last two songs aren't very good: "The Eternal" has a cool electric piano, I guess, but its title is all too apt; "Decades" goes on even longer, does even less; and has a nauseating harpsichord part. But I gotta say it, depression has never been as darkly, strangely entertaining. This was Joy Division's last album before Ian Curtis violently and tragically hanged himself.
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Masterpiece of despair and confusion
Without a doubt, Closer is one of the best albums ever created by any band in any genre, period. In my opinion, Joy Division's other record, Unknown Pleasures, sounds like child's play compared to this. While Unknown Pleasures is the critic's choice, to me it just doesn't carry the same weight as Closer.
Dark and full of despair, Closer paints a picture of a bleak, hostile world in which a sensitive soul strives to cope and make sense of the senseless. Ian Curtis's themes of alienation, hopelessness, and broken trust strike a chord with me like no other songwriter. He just totally nails it. There is nothing contrived about his words or the band's music. These emotions are the real deal to Curtis, evidenced by his singing from the first-person perspective. Simply put, there is not a more authentic document of confusion and despair to be found anywhere in popular music.
The music itself seems to mirror Curtis's words. Grinding, tribal beats are laced with shards of jagged guitars and synths, which creates an air of coldness and detachment. Every song is integral to Closer, but standouts include "Atrocity Exhibition",with its horrific imagery, the confessional "Isolation", and the frantic and harrowing "Twenty Four Hours".
Closer acts like Ian Curtis's suicide note, as he would hang himself a short time after its completion. Therefore, it should not be taken lightly. A true artistic statement, and maybe something more, this is a devestating and stunning album. 1,000 stars out of 10.
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I'm still waiting to hear anything, anything, better
Undoubtedly the best music I own, and arguably the best I've ever had the pleasure to experience. I only wish I'd found it sooner.
Years ago I bought Unknown Pleasures (on vinyl of course in those days) as a hot new album and frankly couldn't get into it. What I took to be a smart-a... "too cool for thou" inside/outside near impenetrable track listing didn't help either. But I bought a LWTUA EP in about 1980 I guess and loved that. Then New Order's Power Corruption and Lies. And so it went as I moved away from "darkness" into living my life. Now years later I quite frankly chanced back on Joy Divison by getting the old rega planar fixed, spinning Unknown Pleasures again and falling instantly in love with it. So I came here and read all these reviews. And bought Closer.
I cannot begin or frankly be very bothered to describe it track by track, except to say I thoroughly agree that (a) it is a soul searing tour de force and (b) it is a complete artifact in its own right. Yes there are tracks you'll play and enjoy, I personally love "A Means to an End" but find I play the CD right through to enjoy the way it takes you on a ride and then eases you down into a blissful sense of quiet and joy at the end. Joy? Yes joy. Whilst obviously dark and even fearful it is never depressing. The honesty and rawness of the emotional journey seem to me to be a kind of cathartic release.
This is 10 star album on any 5 star rating system.
Oh, and BTW, the reader seeking Joy Divison simply must go and see Corbijn's film Control. It is extraordinary, a wonderful wonderful taste of that time for those of us without Mr Wells' machine. But beware, it heads to the ending we all know without ever wavering ... it's like riding in a plane as it noses over into an irretrievable dive. A harsh and devasting end awaits. And of course you simply can't avoid it - the dive just gets steeper and steeper and ...
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4.5/AS GOOD AS 'POST-PUNK' GETS
Someone on Amazon said if 'you' don't like this Cd, 'you're' not human. I think that's an atrocious accusation, 'cause this CD is really difficult to get into. The production style is to sound what motor oil is to visual beauty...in other words, the sound is ugly. And the melodies don't make up for it. I figure that's the idea, so, b/c of that one person's ambitious statement about my/'your' lack of humanity, I decided to give this 1 or 2 more listens, just to see what on earth she (or maybe it was a he...) was talking about. Little by little I got more accepting of it. Eventually, I found a small bit of delight in the minimalistic production style and instrumentation, and that small delight grew and one day (today actually...) I found myself jumping for joy when I found this CD LOCALLY(!), for a reasonable price ($12.99+tax). I bought this at Barnes & Noble, which is not my first choice for buying CDS, but I think I might shop there more often, since, as I had known all along, their selection is vastly superior to these other junk CD shops in my home town (Cape Girardeau, MO; about two hours south of St. Louis). My finding of this CD confirms that. Anyhoo, this CD is mainly a mood piece, so it's definitely not a 'must have' for all music lovers and isn't even a must-listen most of the time, unless you're always/'most'ways in a gloomy depressed mood & can tolerate listening to the SAME THING DAY IN AND DAY OUT, but I guess there are quite a few people that are able to do that without boredom for a lot longer than I am. This CD is a small gem in the indie music world (and I mean 'indie' as in non-mainstream, not 'indie' as in owned-by-an-indie-label; sad I have to sepcify that, since the term 'alternative' used to mean exactly what 'indie' means today...). For $12.99 (or less if you live in a city that isn't full of small minded people who don't even have the will to listen to a well rounded selection of music even in the POP arena...), I'd say it was a worthy purchase.
I must say that I DO NOT like the majority of this type of music. I absolutely HATE The Psychedelic Furs' self titled album and the dozen or half dozen or so similiar albums I've heard. This is an exception, although I do plan to purchase UNKNOWN PLEASURES (also by Joy Division) sometime in the next month or two.