126. Shadowplay

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures (Factory, 1979);
composed by Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, and Bernard Sumner

I rarely speculate on what might have happened if any artist who dies or otherwise absents themselves had not done so – and Ian Curtis might as well be the face on that particular milk carton. Insofar as his collaborators had more than enough juice to reconfigure themselves as New Order, a very different band with a comparable albeit rather more cheerful legacy, Curtis was lucky. But they all were. Each of their two albums signifies in a different and equally plangent way. Depression was Curtis’s great (or primary) subject, but on Closer (too appropriate a title), it defined the parameters and the often almost static spaciness of the music, while Curtis’s disinclination to sing on key ever again squared the circle. On the debut Unknown Pleasures, however, music and topic collided at steeper angles. This track might be the most rocked-out thing they ever recorded, but in a way unique to them and their weird-ass producer Martin Hannett: tension, dynamic shifts, and dead space delineated by bass and skeletal drums, setting up infusions of almost orchestral guitar noise alternating with a creepy single-note figure answering Curtis’s grim ruminations. Can depression actually sound cheerful? No, but it sure can be precise.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.