Ian Curtis Film In the Offing - Page 2

Hannett helped transform Joy Division from the screech and thrash of their early days to the mapping of dark emotional landscapes that characterized their greatest work. The white water rush and straining of Curtis' Bowie-esque upper register slowed and broadened into a majestic doomed baritone of stunning dark beauty.

The Joy Division sound employed Hook's melodic lead bass; Sumner's sweeping, twisting, ringing guitar; Morris' touchy, mechanistic drums; Hannett's synthesizer shadings; and Curtis traversing time and space seeking a hole in the fabric that would lead to peace - a peace he may or may not have found in death.

Hannett took particular interest in the drum sounds: obsessively requiring Morris to dis-and-reassemble his drum kit on the third day of the Unknown Pleasures sessions, making innovative use of echo and delay to create depth and resonance, and helping to create the double snare rhythms that would propel a thousand modern rock dance tunes.

Wilson knew Hannett had a gift, he would "strip these sounds to their perfect, naked form, and then ... start creating imaginary rooms for each sound ... He could see sound, shape it, rebuild it."

This he did on the greatest Joy Division songs: the stately "Day of the Lords" with the ominous refrain, "Where will it end?"; the eerie familiarity of "New Dawn Fades" (covered reverentially by Moby on the Heat soundtrack); the robotic inexorability of "She's Lost Control" - all from Unknown Pleasures.

Closer contributed to the mystique, driven by the lonely, synth-based "Isolation," with Curtis' vocals appropriately remote and reverberant.

Still contains, remarkably, even better music: "Transmission," with its joyless exhortation to "dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio," reminds us that humans can be as thoughtlessly deterministic as radio waves. "Dead Souls" (NIN's cover on The Crow soundtrack makes the link between Joy Division and industrial music explicit) makes expert use of dynamics and is Curtis' finest moment as he rails against the voices from beyond the grave that beckon to him.

"Love Will Tear Us Apart" is one of the greatest singles of all time: a bright, percussive guitar strum gives way to a hypnotic synth line, and then Curtis is almost cheerful as he confides that even love is an agent of isolation.

After Curtis died, the remaining band members (plus Gillian Gilbert on guitar and keyboards) transformed into New Order and a more overtly electronic sound, but that's another story.

Some excellent Joy Division pics are here.

Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and former publisher of Blogcritics.org, and former publisher of Technorati.com, which both rule. He is now editor, co-founder, and CEO of The Morton Report.

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