Editorial Review:

Album Description:
1997 release, a four disc set on London packaged in a 6 x 10in gatefold digibook with an 80 page illustrated book. 80 tracks total, including all cuts from the albums 'Unknown Pleasures', 'Closer' & 'Substance', seven of the nine studiorecordings on 'Still', plus Peel session versions of 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', 'Exercise One' & 'Colony', the version of 'As You Said' that appeared as the uncredited track on New Order's 'Video 586' 12 single and last --but certainly not least-- 35 previously unreleased gems comprised of live & rare versions of their absolute finest. Utterly brilliant.

Amazon.com:
Though Joy Division's anxious, angular songs echoed time-honored art-school obsessions from the Doors through Eno, they never stooped to cheap nostalgia or pretentious condescension. Neither bridge nor battering ram, the band's music--haunting and hypnotic, with an emotionally naked core as bleak as it was compelling--has transcended disposable pop culture past and present; leader-vocalist Ian Curtis's 1980 suicide only underscored the notion that Joy Division was a band out of time, figuratively as well as literally. In just over two years, the Manchester, U.K., group constructed a legacy whose influences have surfaced with the surviving members' New Order through macabre, psychically-damaged Curtis/Cobain parallels to the sonic atmospherics of Radiohead. And if their recorded output was limited, it has long been ill served by the record industry's worst Cuisinart instincts. Thus, this artfully designed four-disc, 81-track box should reign as the band's definitive recorded history. Journalist Jon Savage collaborated with band members Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook to assemble Joy Division's legacy into four subtly different chapters. Discs one and two center around the band's albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer respectively, culling singles, demos, and outtakes. Disc three gathers BBC and Peel sessions and more than a dozen previously unreleased outtakes. The final chapter may be the most artistically revealing: 17 live tracks that represent not only the best of the band's darkly compelling songs, but show their riveting stage presence during a performance peak that spanned but seven months. The accompanying booklet presents an almost Rashomon-like take on the band, from its spare, impressionistic imagery through its multiple essays and, crucially, the lyrics of Ian Curtis, starkly presented as the candid, disquieting poetry that was the essence of Joy Division's murmuring heart and troubled soul. --Jerry McCulley









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• Control (The Miriam Collection)
• Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division
• Joy Division (The Miriam Collection)
• Warsaw
• Closer
• see more

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Disc 1:

1. Digital
2. Glass
3. Disorder
4. Day of the Lords
5. Candidate
6. Insight
7. New Dawn Fades
8. She's Lost Control
9. Shadowplay
10. Wilderness
11. Interzone
12. I Remember Nothing
13. Ice Age
14. Exercise One
15. Transmission
16. Novelty
17. The Kill
18. The Only Mistake
19. Something Must Break
20. Auto-Suggestion
21. From Safety to Where...?

Disc 2:

1. She's Lost Control 12
2. Sound of Music
3. Atmosphere
4. Dead Souls
5. Komakino
6. Incubation
7. Atrocity Exhibition
8. Isolation
9. Passover
10. Colony
11. Means to an End
12. Heart and Soul
13. Twenty Four Hours
14. The Eternal
15. Decades
16. Love Will Tear Us Apart
17. These Days

Disc 3:

1. Warsaw
2. No Love Lost
3. Leaders of Men
4. Failures
5. The Drawback
6. Interzone
7. Shadowplay
8. Exercise One
9. Insight
10. Glass
11. Transmission
12. Dead Souls
13. Something Must Break
14. Ice Age
15. Walked in Line
16. These Days
17. Candidate
18. The Only Mistake
19. Chance (Atmosphere)
20. Love Will Tear Us Apart
21. Colony
22. As You Said
23. Ceremony
24. In a Lonely Place (Detail)

Disc 4:

1. Dead Souls [Live]
2. The Only Mistake [Live]
3. Insight [Live]
4. Candidate [Live]
5. Wilderness [Live]
6. She's Lost Control [Live]
7. Disorder [Live]
8. Interzone [Live]
9. Atrocity Exhibition [Live]
10. Novelty [Live]
11. Auto-Suggestion
12. Remember Nothing
13. Colony
14. These Days
15. Incubation
16. The Eternal
17. Heart and Soul
18. Isolation
19. She's Lost Control

Rating: - Great music, poor packaging
If you want to get some Joy Division on CD, you need to get this box set. It's just about their complete discography of official releases and contains everything you need - both studio albums, all the singles, and a nice bunch of live recordings. The music is outstanding - kind of a blend of the Doors, The Cure, mixed with a Sex Pistols edge... you can tell JD were a huge influence on U2 and many other bands that followed. Really they have a unique sound all their own that stands out from everything else before or since. The packaging on this box set though flat out stinks. The 2nd time I opened mine it fell apart, seriously. And while the book is thick, the information isn't that good - the writer tried to be artsy and it doesn't come off well; I would prefer a detailed band bio and stuff about the songs. But if you want Joy Division, Heart and Soul is THE item to get. Highly recommended.

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Rating: - box set...
all i can say is i love this box set, it is perfect and i love joy division.....buy this set now!!!!11

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Rating: - Essential for Joy Division fans
I'm in another phase of (re)exploring Joy Division, on the heels of finally watching the excellent Ian Curtis bio-pic "Control", which never made it in the theaters here in Cincinnati but I saw recently on DVD. It happens to me every couple of years that I feel the need the re-listen to this set from start to finish. I bought the original UK-issue of this, back in 1997.

"Heart and Soul" (4CDs, 81 tracks, 309 min.) brings just about everything that Joy Division ever recorded. CD1 (21 tracks; 78 min.) centers around the 1979 debut album "Unknown Pleasures", augmented by assorted singles and outtakes. Listening to tracks like "She's Lost Control", "Shadowplay" and "I Remember Nothing" reminds me why this band is still relevant, almost 30 years later. CD2 (17 tracks; 76 min.) centers around the 1980 album "Closer", again with lots of additional tracks from that era. CD3 (24 tracks; 78 min.) capatures everything else, including the early "Warsaw" music, 3 tracks from the "John Peele Sessions" and a bunch of unreleased stuff, such as the fantastic "Ceremony" and "In A Lonely Place". CD4 (19 tracks; 77 min.) is a collection of live tracks. The sound quality for many of them is not great, but they are still essential. The best of the bunch are the last 5, recorded in December 1979, when the band previewed a number of tracks that would eventually make it on the "Closer" album (released in July, 1980). Check out the live version of "Heart and Soul" and then listen to what it would eventually become in its final studio version, simply fascinating!

This box comes with a wealth of information, including studio session dates, release dates of singles and album, various articles and great liner notes. The article "Good Everning, We're Joy Division" (which was originally published in MoJo in 1994, according to the liner notes) is an eye-opener. This box is essential for any serious Joy Division fan (is there such a thing as the 'casual' fan? maybe, I don't know). And frankly, this is essential for any music lover, as the influence of Joy Division over the years has only grown (check Interpol, She Wants Revenge, and many other bands of this era). HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

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Rating: - IAN CURTIS: A Singer and A Poet
I travelled far and wide through many different times,
What did you see there?
I saw the saints with their toys,
What did you see there?
I saw all knowledge destroyed.
I travelled far and wide through many different times.

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Rating: - The Box Set We Should Have Seen for New Order
This is as close as you can get to the definitive Joy Division collection. The live material is just as good, with all of the concert recordings coming from the soundboard. This is a welcome change from years of scratchy vinyl audience-recorded bootlegs. The best part of this box set has to be the studio demos of two songs never properly released by Joy Division due to Ian's untimely death - 'Ceremony' and 'In A Lonely Place.'

Although 'Ceremony' was performed at the last live JD venue in Birmingham and found on the Still double LP release, this studio version includes audible lyrics for the first verse. We can't hear Ian in the Still version until the second verse due to soundboard problems. I was disappointed that Peter Hook cuts off 'In A Lonely Place' just as Ian started singing the version that contains, "Hangman looks 'round while he waits; cord stretches tight then in breaks." The official word on this is that during the original demo, the quality of the recording deteriorated after that verse. If that was the case, I'm sure the band would have recorded a second demo after they heard the playback.

After witnessing this release, I was expecting a similar release for New Order, but unfortunately, the New Order box set excludes many early rarities, like Homage, Haystack, and original 1980 recordings sans Gillian Gilbert.

Overall, Heart and Soul is a must have for the avid Joy Division aficionado.