Joy Division—Unknown Pleasures

Joy Division—Unknown Pleasures (1979)

Unknown Pleasures—Joy Division's singular debut was their third recording on their third label, which is the greatest testament to how hard it was to identify the band. The rejected full-length Warsaw and the self-released EP An Ideal for Living (1978) were promising in their own ways (though the former could not commercially be heard until 1994). The latter picked four fascism-fascinated songs from their repertoire and delivered them in fairly straightforward punk fashion, though the overall tone and production values gave them a bleak coloration from the beginning.

The band's rise is inextricably tied to the formation of Factory Records, an independent label formed in 1978 by television host Tony Wilson, actor Alan Erasmus, artist Peter Saville, and record producer Martin "Zero" Hannett. Joy Division joined the label soon after appearing on Wilson's music TV series So It Goes, and appeared on A Factory Sample (1978) along with The Durutti Column, John Dowie, and Cabaret Voltaire. They contribute the songs "Digital" and "Glass," which forecast the sound of their forthcoming album, Unknown Pleasures. Produced by Hannett (who until then was only known for producing the Buzzcocks' debut EP Spiral Scratch and some spoken word acts), the band's sound was now clearer and more pronounced, more drum-focused, and was characterized by many strange sound effects. "Glass," for example, featured a range of electronic noises and handclaps, neither of which were notable on their own, but made for a unique mix.

The album format also had the effect of focusing lead singer Ian Curtis' lyrical themes, which during their early phase were more integral to the song rather than the overall ambiance. That's not to say Unknown Pleasures is a marked concept album, but the shift from surface punk angst to the dark depression of songs like "Disorder" is stark. Accentuated by Peter Hook's melodic bass lines and surrounded by Hannett's phantasmal effects, Curtis sings one of his most well-known and characteristic verses: "I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand/Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man/New sensations bear the insults, leave them for another day/I've got the spirit, lose the feeling, take the shock away." The eerie, shambling "Day of the Lords" paints a war-torn generation. The two songs form an effective one-two punch because they both descend into affecting, authentic catharses; with another band, "Disorder" might be too obscure and "Day of the Lords" might drag. The creeping dirge "Candidate" is a sinister representation of a relationship destroyed by an unwillingness to compromise. The pessimistic, dejected "Insight" is infused with various alarming noises that give it an apocalyptic feel, plus enigmatic electronic squeaking. The devilish "New Dawn Fades" is the album's climax: a flawed person's struggle that unfortunately turned out to be autobiographical.

"She's Lost Control," inspired by the epilepsy-related death of a girl whom Curtis had met at his day job (a condition he suffered from himself), is characterized by its harrowing, ritualistic mantra. The awesome "Shadowplay" is the album's most explosive song, with cutting guitar that perfectly complements Curtis' increasing pandemonium. "Wilderness" is the most thematically and sentimentally basic (as well as most repetitive) song on the album. The Naked Lunch-inspired "Interzone" is the only song in Joy Division's main canon where another member (Hook) sings lead, though Curtis can be heard answering in the background. The isolative abyss of "I Remember Nothing," replete with sounds of breaking glass and other curiosities, possibly represents best the surface idiosyncrasies of the band without exactly getting into self-parody—it's amusing to note that the Talking Heads song "The Overload," which attempted to capture Joy Division's purported sound without having actually heard it, sounds exactly like "I Remember Nothing."

Unknown Pleasures, and by extension Joy Division themselves, is an anomaly. It at once sounds muddled, like a debut might, and developed—the kind of sound only a band with experience can come up with. That can be explained by the avant-garde production of Martin Hannett and the fact that Pleasures wasn't technically their first album attempt, but it also speaks to the striking, visionary lyrics of Ian Curtis and the surprising proficiency of the band. The album occasionally borders on boring musically, but in its best moments, it's emotionally moving and tastefully literate. It bears a sympathetic tone that works paradoxically well with the power of its riffs and animalistic percussion, creating a sound that for many people defined U.K. post-punk, arguably establishing them as the movement's premier band.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse—Rust Never Sleeps

Neil Young & Crazy Horse—Rust Never Sleeps

Rust Never Sleeps—When Neil Young released the career-spanning Decade in 1977, it marked the end of an era. The 70s were not always kind to Young, who scored a hit with Harvest in 1972, but lost his friends, Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. The grief he experienced was channeled into much of his music from the time, most notably Tonight's the Night (1975, but recorded variously from 1970-73). That album was released in place of Homegrown, which was meant to follow On the Beach (1974), but was shelved by Young, who called it "a very down album." Many of Young's albums from the subsequent period of time around the turn of the decade were unfinished or hodgepodge. When he scrapped Homegrown, he began slowly dispersing its songs through Zuma (1975), Long May You Run (1976), American Stars 'n Bars (1977), and Decade, at which point he had begun work on Chrome Dreams, which also would never be released. Some of its songs were holdovers from Homegrown and ended up taking up most of American Stars 'n Bars, while the rest have become miscellany and, more notably, the genesis of Rust Never Sleeps.

After the sidestep of Comes a Time (1978), which was his most straightforward country-rock record since Harvest had scored him a hit, and the production of his movie Human Highway, Young began a new tour where each show featured separate acoustic and electric sets. Rather than attempt to emulate the performances in-studio, Young decided instead to use concert recordings with overdubs, effectively making Rust Never Sleeps a live album aside from two songs on the acoustic side. The notes to the CD issue say that Rust is "a loose-knit concept album built around Young's conviction that an artist's reach must always exceed his grasp; that the alternative to creative growth was stagnation and irrelevancy." The record is bookended by differing versions of the same song; side one opens with "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)," co-written by Ducks bandmate Jeff Blackburn, which remarks that the recently-deceased Elvis Presley sadly "faded away." He then name-checks Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten, wondering if Rotten will meet a similar fate: fading into obscurity, drug-addled and overweight. What's exceptional about the song is that it says all this despite its sparse lyrics and arrangement.

Young reaches a new high on the autobiographical "Thrasher," commenting on his rocky tenure with the commercially-upheld Crosby, Stills & Nash, offering, "I searched out my companions/Who were lost in crystal canyons" before he left for the California countryside prior to the release of Harvest. "When the thrasher comes," he sings, referring to the onset of crass commercialism, "I'll be stuck in the sun like the dinosaurs in shrines/But I'll know the time has come to give what's mine," stating he will remain true to his principles. The song closes out with a moving harmonica solo. "Ride My Llama" is a bucolic number that recalls Zuma, except when Young sings, "I met a man from Mars/He picked up all my guitars/And played me traveling songs." "Pocahontas," named of course for the Native American icon, details the slaughter of those people by settlers, positing "We'll sit and talk of Hollywood/And the good things there for hire/And the Astrodome and the first tepee/Marlon Brando, Pocahontas, and me." It also includes the satire, "I would give a thousand pelts/To sleep with Pocahontas/In the morning on the fields of green," as Young cleverly rolls down to a melancholy lick as he does every time the song hits on a mournful observance. "Sail Away" is the simplest message, accompanied by Nicolette Larson, who was featured heavily in a backing role on Comes a Time (for which he probably considered the song).

"Powderfinger," basic enough that it could be about any number of things, details a premature death, with the powerful lyric, "Raised my rifle to my eye/Never stopped to wonder why/Then I saw black and my face splashed in the sky." Young originally offered it to Lynyrd Skynyrd and recorded it himself for Chrome Dreams as a shorter acoustic ballad. "Welfare Mothers" is the most puzzling song in the set: "Welfare mothers," who "make better lovers," wash "down at every laundromat in town now." It does rock, however, as does "Sedan Delivery," which may be something like the story of a parallel-universe Bruce Berry. "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" helps support this theory, being the darkened mirror image of the opening song, with the key lyrical difference being "You pay for this, but they give you that;" Young previously employed the tactic of closing Tonight's the Night with a more ragged version of the title song, and on Rust it not only ends ragged but positively mucked-up.

Having already made numerous masterpieces, it would have been easy to mark Neil Young for lean years as the 1980s approached. Instead, he delivered his most astounding work yet, without a single average-or-worse cut, and set a watermark for thoughtful, inventive rock and roll, which, as he puts it, is here to stay.