Review Summary: While a lot of cyberpunk, sci-fi and fantasy novellas wax poetically about a dystopian future. This is a album grounded in the present despising the future it knows is coming, and it's a beautiful piece of art because of it.
This album is in all ways the antithesis to an album like Dark Side Of The Moon, an album that resonates with it's own darkness and fetishization of the recesses and silence of space but still with a glimmer of hope.. The fractal of light, although just a easily scientifically explained phenomena a spot of color regardless that inspires awe in the darkness. This is a futuristic album that laments the present and wishes to further isolate because it knows the future is no better.
Some view the name 'Joy Division' as a shock-value seeking of attention, some even said it was a embracing of fascism.. It's more of a statement. This world will keep you locked from your true potential and it will *** you. It will commit atrocities to you and everyone around you and leave you battered and sad.
"I've seen the nights, filled with bloodsport and pain/And the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained/Where will it end?" is one of the lyrics that really just nails that point in."
This is *that* kind of depressing album, and I can see it being a turn-off to a lot of people. It soaks itself in liminal space, every track is heavy in a emotional sense soaking you and leaving you in the same dismal abyss that Ian was going through mentally. Every song is a cry for pain, and it's overbearing at times but that's why it has resonated with so many people for so long. This album has this weirdly strange misconception as a t-shirt album, but it's so much more. This album will suck you dry, and that's the point.
There's all of these futuristic alluding, these whooshings and sounds meant to emulate the far future and our near space.. Yet it loathes the present, and it's a future that Ian knew would not include him being the only album he saw the release of before his suicide. It makes all these songs about how he's given up all-the-more potent, he had given up. His voice all that's left as a radio signal like the one on the cover.
There may be sadder, more depressing albums out there like A Crow Look At Me by Mt. Eerie but this is one of the only ones that will make you soak in it. It whispers assuredly in your ear; "Things aren't going to get better before they get worse.". This album is perfect to me from start to finish, even as the cynical asshole I am I find it hard to fully embrace such morbid albums with a point that is "There's no point." but this is one of the most emotionally potent albums to exist. It's overbearing, it's noisy, and it's thin on purpose. It's the audio equivalent of a thin string waiting to break before it falls in a ocean and drowns never to be seen again. It's one of the heaviest things you'll ever hear, and maybe you won't like that. But, it's going to be like a Sisyphean boulder paralyzing you in place while you listen regardless.
