Product Description

The news of singer Ian Curtis's suicide still hung in the air when this album was released. Given the deep introspective nature of Joy Division's music, his death invested CLOSER with an even greater pessimism. Yet there is a fragile beauty in its content and if Curtis's voice seems more distant, it complements the sparse textures created by mesmerising synthesizer lines and occasional, highly effective, piano. Slow, hypnotic tempos increase the sense of brooding mystery andif the few faster songs provide musical relief, their lyrics prove equally tortured. Eerie, yet compulsive, CLOSER confirmed Joy Divison's pre-eminent place in rock's pantheon.

Track Listing

1. Heart And Soul
2. Twenty Four Hours
3. Eternal
4. Decades
5. Atrocity Exhibition
6. Isolation
7. Passover
8. Colony
9. Means To An End

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1581 in Music
• Released on: 2006-04-12
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
In retrospect, Closer, the second and final album by this Mancunian band, seems to point straight at singer Ian Curtis's suicide, which happened a few months before it was released. The band's reverberating mesh of minor-key lines and Curtis's bass voice are gloomy enough on their own, and attention to the words reveals references to blacker-than-black stories by JG Ballard and Joseph Conrad; the void and its terrors were splitting Curtis apart from the inside. "I put my trust in you," he sings, and his voice leaves no doubt that that trust has been betrayed. But the music, grim and powerful as it is, points to the direction the surviving members took as New Order, incorporating the mechanical gravity of club rhythms. --Douglas Wolk

Customer Reviews

The Highest Human Achievement
Essential. Peerless. This is the end product of millions of years of evolution. A terrible, cold beauty that stands as testament to the meaninglessness of existence. Play it at your sister.

song by song review
im editing this after listening to it about 10 times now.

Atrocity Exhiition - like it. curtis sounds like he's in the room with you

Isolation - one of JD's best songs and perhaps best use of a synthesiser ever?

Passover - good

Colony - brilliant.

Means - fantastic. great bass. you could dance to this and no doubt curtis did.

heart & soul - lot of echo on ian's voice. great drumming. a very good track.

24 hrs - takes a while to get into but a good track.

eternal - deep song.

decades - the best song on the album and one of the great musical achievements of the last or indeed this century. in a word - masterpiece. the whole band at their best. ian looking at the nature of existence itself. you will question life itself after listening to this.

definately top 10 album. unfortunately cant change it to a five star.

'Leaders of Men'
Still sounding years ahead of its time, `Closer' has a reputation for coldness, for despair and for grim Northern doom-and-gloom, but I don't hear anything like that. I hear tough, life-affirming, FIERCE rock music, and while there's not much in the way of fun to be had here, it's not obligatory to have to take it so seriously.
The songs are (mostly) reflective and searching, but none of them are `dirges'. You could even dance to a couple of them, although you might struggle, knowing what happened just a few short weeks after it's completion.
Martin Hannett's production is excellent, giving each song a clear and clean-ness, which allows every detailed lyric to bite home, to reach every nook and cranny of your psyche. In every sense we must participate in the pain, but we know that ultimately, by suffering it, this music (and very few others) breathes victory into our lives. It's beauty cannot bring anything but positives to our existence.
A lot has been written about 'Closer' in an attempt to mystify and mythify it, most of it gleefully encouraged by Tony Wilson and co at Factory Records, and while I'm not going to de-bunk all that, you should really take it all with a pinch of salt, for what it is. A (brilliantly successful!) marketing ploy.
Which is not to say 'Closer' is meaningless, devoid of point. Far from it. It means more to me, and a lot of other people, than I can possibly describe in a few short (admittedly brilliant!) paragraphs.
A big part of my life (still...sorry.), and always will be, 'Closer' is a true great, not stained in any way by the decades (sorry again.) of hyperbole which have followed it around.
Buy it twice.