Joy Division: Classic Or Dud?

I dunno, "How To Disappear Completely" is kind of dispairing.

xpost

But Radiohead can often be brooding no? They certainly have made some pretty depressing music. When I think of happy music, RH is not the first to come to mind.

Just came across the lyrics for George Harrison's "Only a Northern Song" and realized they were strangely appropriate for this thread:

If you're listening to this song
You may think the chords are going wrong
But they're not
He just wrote it like that

When you're listening late at night
You may feel the bands are not quite right
But they are
They just play it like that

It doesn't really matter what chords I play
What words I say
Or time of day it is
As it's only a Northern Song

It doesn't really matter what clothes I wear
Or how I fare
Or if my hair is brown
When it's only a Northern Song

If you think the harmony
Is a little dark and out of key
You're correct
There's nobody there

And I told you there's no one there

It's probably a completely inappropriate reaction, but when I hear "How To Disappear Completely" the closest emotion I can think of to describe the feeling evoked by the song is "rapture".

Understandable, especially when those gorgeous strings sweep in, but the vocals? That's dispair, baby.

The vocals float into the music for me. I barely pay attention to anything Thom Yorke says. (I do take the point that "I'm Not here/It isn't happening" could be a message of despair but it doesn't sound that way TO ME, which is really the only point I'm trying to make; "Well the world don't move/To the beat of just one drum" etc etc.)

radiohead did that song?

"Love Will Tear Us Apart" is the one Joy Division song I don't "get" all the hype about because it's a good melody but there's NO HARMONY WHATSOEVER IN THE HOOK WTF WHY ARE THE BASSLINE, SYNTH, AND IAN CURTIS' VOICE ALL FOLLOWING THE SAME MELODY LINE

Oh, we're talking about Radiohead now. F that.

curtisss: there are more notes in the bass part than in the vocal during the hook

Hooky!

The confluence of voice, synth and bass on the chorus is EXACTLY what ameks that song genius!

i agree. they are following the same general movement, but at paces different enough to keep things interesting. note how the bass drags behind the vocal. i believe the synth line drags even farther behind.

i'm actually trying to imagine in my head what the chorus would sound like if all the parts were *really* the same.

"love will tear us apart (sesame street hootenanny mix)"

i should note again that they are playing different numbers of notes. the bass is i think playing more notes b/t intervals yes? and while the synth line is similar to the vocal line, it drags behind *and* has fewer rests--each chord follows the other w/little pause. the result is rhythmically and otherwise involving. i hope i am using the right terminology and am making sense.

i mean i guess the melody of this song is pretty uninteresting as a melody--it's not very mobile. but it doesn't have to me, because the textures of the song are so involving! i think of this as a defining quality of joy division.

i mean the vocal melody.

am-ek (v.): To spontaneously turn into a solid gold burrito that gives blowjobs.

radiohead did that song?
-- amateur!!!st (---...), September 19th, 2004.

yeah they also did the theme song for 'one day at a time' but the network thought it was too 'peppy'.

dan did my description make any sense?

Also, the bridge in the middle (which is repeated at the end) adds some rhythmic variability. There's only one chord being played during those sections, too, so it's sonically quite separate from the verses and chorus as well.

also IIRC that synth plays the chorus' vocal melody during the verses. so when the vocal melody "comes home" to the synth line as it were, it's very cathartic and satisfying.

how's your "love will tear us apart" now, curtisss?

what a beautiful song

i always had this sense from the record, that the vocalist and the other instrumentalists were playing the same song, but in different rooms, responding not to each other directly but to each other's distant reverberations.

the part where it changes keys toward the end is amazing (at 2:57 on the cd i have)

i have never really had a clear idea what i.c. is singing about, btw. sounds kinda sad

I think it kind of depends on the droning d-note on the bassline (I dunno if it's even there or if it's just kind of implicit in my mind when I hear it) that makes it feel anchored to the same chord. I saw them do it live and Sumner was playing major chords on a guitar, like D-B-G-A or something, and it fucked the whole thing up.

The synths that come in on the verses make it.

"a cold blue laser light of power"??

Yup. Something so focused, so completely locked in and harrowing...but not something sprawling and rampaging, Hannett's production keeps it from being so. Ever since I've first heard the song the color it calls up in my mind is blue, a cold blue.

uh them = New Order

ned, your comment and the turn this thread has taken in the last few hours got me thinking about the formalist criticism question again. now i don't mean to single you out cos i do it too (see robert wyatt thread) but the blue-laser thing the kind of description that i think is ultimately i kind of critical dead end (i mean, it can be evocative and useful to a point, but it's sort of lack walking up to the gates of the taj mahal and forgetting where you put the keys), and to which i would prefer some kind of attempt at breaking down the stylistic features of the song such that one's involvement in it can be explained somehow/to some extent.

i'm almost completely musicially illiterate, so i don't think my efforts to explain how "love will tear us apart" works contributed very much to anyone's understanding of the song. so i'm not sure i should posit my own posts as any kind of positive example. but i know that "love will tear us apart" has always struck me as a very involving song (such that i will often listen to it several times in a row). yet most criticism about it tends to adopt very very vague impressionistic, almost mystical language to explain its power and the charms of joy division in general. but i think that's dodging the real "problem." to quote tim on the "formalist criticism" thread, from one of my favorite posts ever made on ilm:

How does a given piece of music "cast a spell" over us? Too much non-formal music resorts to quasi-mythic terminology at that point, but the spell in question is really a piece of elaborate charlatanism, a confluence of sonic tactics which, in the mind or the body of the listener, appears to be something more than a series of discrete sounds. What is it that is allowing to a piece of music to do this to us (both at a "textual" and contextual level)?

to be fair i think your comment falls somewhere a little bit closer on the spectrum to stylistic description than tim's "quasi-mythic terminology." but it doesn't really help me *hear* "transmission." i find a lot of criticism like that. (including my own informal criticism.)

another tim quote, even more to the point perhaps:

You can't separate the two things. The tightness of the groove in James Brown or whatever is a concrete phenomenon that can be measured and analyzed. The "spell" is not a metaphysical thing; it's made up of real components

Is it a grayish blue? I have a vinyl copy of Substance, so I hear "Transmission" as being gray partly because Substance has a gray cover. (The green on the cover is like the green of LED lights.)

That said, there's something about JD's sound that lends itself to being heard as gray or grayish blue (as opposed to, say, purple or pink). I'm not sure why, offhand, one hears the guitar and bass sounds this way. Perhaps the "starkness" of the production makes the listener feel like he or she is in some large, urban space. There's also the robotic character of the music. Ian Curtis' voice is very robotic on that track. And robots, of course, are gray (or silver).

The Still album cover was gray, too, wasn't it?

yeah i associate them with gray, but a dark metallic gray

Do you associate them more with black when you listen to Unknown Pleasures, or white when you listen to Closer?

haha I wz thinking about the goth question above last night and I wz gonna say they are grey to me not black but Ian Curtis suicide made the music darker.

Am, I think you're pushing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction here. I was trying to describe a Dizzee Rascal song to Ned and came up with the phrase "it's the one with the sped-up Kanye beat grafted onto the navel of a supermodel" (ie, it's a deeply sexy, sensual-sounding soul loop that's been sped up so the vocals are chipmunked) and Ned knew instantly which track I was talking about. The evocative can have just as much power and meaning as breaking down the components and doing a theoretical analysis (and 7 times out of 10 it will be more powerful and meaningful because most people aren't interested in breaking down a piece of music to understand WHY certain sonic tricks and chord progressions produce certain emotional responses).

Obvious point alert, but I think there's room for both approaches in the space of the same review. I don't like reviews that operate exclusively in the realm of vague-but-pretty-sounding metaphors, but nor do I like exclusively technical ones - oddly both extremes are most annoying in dance music reviews, but maybe that's just because I feel "close" to the reviewer's tricks. I don't think its tautological to include, say, both Dan's description and his parenthetical justification for that description. In fact that's the *best* way in the long term because then you really get a feel for how Dan's mind works in constructing those metaphors. But if the metaphor is presented in isolation and is too remote from how the music actually sounds that can be difficult.

Hm, well, anything I could add at this point would be rambling perhaps. But it's not a grayish blue, I'll note. Tim's point is well observed and generally speaking I do try and balance off description with elaboration in my reviews though I don't think I do so consciously.

NB. Ned I think you generally do too. Though I've read so many of your allmusic reviews plus everything here and on other fora that I could probably decode your metaphors without thinking (sort of like how I "hear" subtitled foreign films in English).

Heh heh heh. "He's talking about 'arcing overdrive' again, it MUST mean that he's referring to the use of an 808 pulse and an envelope filter..."

Generally speaking the two approaches go together anyway. I find it hard to construct anything but the most hackneyed, cliched metaphors about the sound of rock records that I like because I haven't invested as much time scrutinising their sonics as I have with electronic stuff.

Interestingly, I've remembered Ned's description of "Transmission" since he posted it three years ago - I think it even kind of added a dimension to how I hear the song or at least managed to neatly express something I hear about it. I found it to be a very evocative image. I don't think it's vague or mythic. It implies, as he said, focus and tightness, cool efficiency, unwavering forward momentum, clarity.

Gosh, why thank ya Sundar. That's quite a compliment!

I think Ned's reviews are a pink ray of starlight as seen thru a prism made of opal and fairy dust. hard and soft at the same time like a gently roasted turtle.

I think Scott Seward's hair is a flowing river of gold cascading down a mystical landscape of green grass, deer and black squelching demons from the underworld of HARD ROCK POWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!

http://www.totalmetal.ru/upload/reviews/pic226.jpg

And Ned, while I enjoyed your live Joy Division review on AMG, and was impressed by how it read like it was in A-flat major -loved the grave, formal phrasing - it ultimately suggested a rondo wearing a correct but unconvincing mourning veil of C minor.

NOW you're just showing off.