Joy Division
Permanent – Joy Division 1995 (Qwest/Warner Bros. 45979)

There are few groups that I've expended more energy trying, but mostly failing, to enjoy than Joy Division. I can't count the number of times I've sat down with a Joy Division album and prepared myself for the life-changing experience implied by virtually everything I've ever read about them. And as much as I like the idea of getting into a band whose leader killed himself, I must say that every time I've given Joy Division a shot, I've come to the same conclusion: the songs just aren't very good.

They sound good (mainly thanks to Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, who would take the sound to more genuinely accomplished heights with New Order), but then there's Ian Curtis's ridiculous voice straight up the middle, comparable to Jim Morrison not only in tone and timbre, but also in overrated status. Curtis croons these songs of desperation in a register slightly below what would probably have been natural for him, and it tends to reduce the effectiveness of the melodies, as in the otherwise very cool "Shadow Play."

In some spots his voice is plain annoying, as on "She's Lost Control," a song that ought to be classic if for no other reason than its magnificent title. Of course, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is a great song, surely one of the best singles of the past 40 years, but its greatness only seems to me to establish Joy Division as a one-hit wonder band, no different from, say, The Wallets, or Fun Boy Three, or Real Life, except that JD has the additional caché of having a suicide for a lead singer and a future-great band as a backing band.

But listening to Joy Division studio output only gives me the impression that I'm listening to New Order's high school band incarnation, when they had the worse lead singer.

Maybe JD is just not my thing. Strangely, though, I am a fan of a lot of similar bands (Japanese Whispers-era Cure, for example, or Depeche Mode, or Yaz, or New Order), but no matter how many times I give it the old college try (pun definitely intended) I can't get into Joy Division.

I suppose the band makes sense to certain people at certain times, and I must have missed my window of opportunity (I'm estimating it as late high-school, a further argument against Joy Division's credibility).

As for the album I'm supposedly reviewing: Permanent: Joy Division 1995 bears a confusing title, leading one to believe that these are 1995 remixes or rerecordings, but in fact it's a compilation designed to solidify Joy Division's relevance in 1995 … which builds in obsolescence from the get-go. Personally, I get a lot more out of Joy Division's live recordings, which capture the band's raw essence instead of its supposed artistry.

Though I'd recommend the live stuff, this disc isn't a bad intro. Much of it has a post-punky depression-fueled angst that I dig, but Ian Curtis as a singer does zero for me. Aside from a few cuts, nothing is strongly memorable for me, although admittedly my problems with the music stem mainly from the hype it's been given over the years.

Joy Division, I think, will always truly belong to those slightly older than me, now approaching their 40s, for whom this was their college or high school music. Any youngsters tackling Joy Division now, I'd say, should try to find something current to like, or if JD is a necessary rite of passage for a particular brand of white kid, then by all means do it and get it over with, and get onto something better.

Really, I don't know why disaffected white nerds don't just get into, like, Faze-O, which would cure them. A pasty white kid burrowing into suicide-pop is a bit like a person with eczema leaping into a patch of poison ivy, right?

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Review by Laurie Lanyard