Joy Division Closer Full Album Download ~UPD~

[Donnie Ehlen]

<div>Closer[n 1] is the second and final studio album by English rock band Joy Division, released on 18 July 1980 by Factory Records.[4] Produced by Martin Hannett, it was released two months after the suicide of the band's lead singer and lyricist Ian Curtis. The album reached No. 6 on the UK Albums Chart[5] and peaked at No. 3 in New Zealand in September 1981.[6] Closer was also named NME Album of the Year.[7][8] It was remastered and re-released in 2007.[4]</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>Joy Division Closer Full Album Download</div><div></div><div>DOWNLOAD: https://t.co/7M1qItOlC2 </div><div></div><div></div><div>Today, Closer is widely recognised as a seminal release of the post-punk era.[9] Following the release of the non-album single "Love Will Tear Us Apart" in June 1980, the remaining members re-formed as New Order.</div><div></div><div></div><div>The songs on Closer were drawn from two distinct periods. The earlier guitar-driven compositions were written during the latter half of 1979: "Atrocity Exhibition", "Passover", "Colony", "A Means to an End" and "Twenty Four Hours". All were played live during that year, with some being recorded for various radio sessions. The album's other songs were written in early 1980, and included more prominent use of synthesisers: "Isolation", "Heart and Soul", "The Eternal" and "Decades".[10] Most songs were written or structured during jam sessions in the band's practice room.[11]</div><div></div><div></div><div>"While we were working on Closer, Ian said to me that doing this album felt very strange, because he felt that all his words were writing themselves. He also said that he had this terrible claustrophobic feeling that he was in a whirlpool and being pulled down, drowning."</div><div></div><div></div><div>Regarding the album's lyrical content, Bernard Sumner recollected: "We'd go to rehearsals and sit around and talk about really banal things. We'd do that until we couldn't talk about banal things any more, then we'd pick up our instruments and record into a little cassette player. We didn't talk about the music or the lyrics very much. We never analysed it."[13]</div><div></div><div></div><div>Closer was recorded between 18 and 30 March 1980 at Britannia Row Studios in Islington, London.[4] It was produced by Martin Hannett. His production has been highly praised, with Pitchfork describing it as "sepulchral."[14] However, as with their debut album, both Hook and Sumner were unhappy with Hannett's work. Peter Hook later complained that the track "Atrocity Exhibition" was mixed on one of his days off, and when he heard the final product he was disappointed that the abrasiveness of his guitar part had been laden with effects and toned down. He wrote; "I was like, head in hands, oh fucking hell, it's happening again. Unknown Pleasures number two ... Martin [Hannett] had melted the guitar with his Marshall Time Waster. Made it sound like somebody strangling a cat, and to my mind, absolutely killed the song. I was so annoyed with him and went in and gave him a piece of my mind but he just turned around and told me to fuck off."[15]</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>The album cover was designed by Martyn Atkins and Peter Saville, with a photograph of the Appiani family tomb in Genoa's Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno adorning much of the sleeve. The photograph was taken by Bernard Pierre Wolff in 1978.[17][18] In a 2007 documentary on the band, designer Saville commented that he, upon learning of singer Ian Curtis's suicide, expressed immediate concern over the album's design as it depicted a funeral theme, remarking "we've got a tomb on the cover of the album!"[n 2]</div><div></div><div></div><div>Closer was released on 18 July 1980 by Factory Records, as a vinyl LP. The album reached No. 6 on the UK Albums Chart.[5] It also peaked at No. 3 in New Zealand in September 1981.[6] Closer was also named NME Album of the Year.[7][8] The album, along with Unknown Pleasures and Still, was remastered and re-released in 2007.[4] As with Unknown Pleasures and Still, the remaster was packaged with a bonus live disc, recorded at the University of London Union.[4]</div><div></div><div></div><div>Factory boss Tony Wilson was pleased with the final album and predicted it would be a commercial success. Sumner recalled him saying at the time, "You know, Bernard, this time next year you'll be lounging by a swimming pool in LA with a cocktail in your hand." Sumner was less optimistic and "just thought it was the most utterly ridiculous thing anyone had ever said to me."[13]</div><div></div><div></div><div>At the time of release, Sounds critic Dave McCullough wrote that there were "dark strokes of gothic rock" on Closer. He described the album as "breathtaking rock music, a peak of current peaks, a sharing of something that's in [...] others at this time, but at the same time defining those black notions and leaving them unmatched."[29] Writing for Smash Hits, Alastair Macaulay described the album as an "exercise in dark controlled passion" and wrote that its music "stands up on its own as the band's epitaph".[30] Writing for Melody Maker, Paolo Hewitt described the album as "probably some of the most irresistible dance music we'll hear this year [and] a far cry for sure from the almost suffocating claustrophobic world of the debut album," adding that "the best (and most subversive?) rock music has always dealt head-on with emotions and thought rather than clichéd, standardised stances; that's what makes Closer and Joy Division so important."[31]</div><div></div><div></div><div>A book titled 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, published in 2005, Closer is defined as a "quantum leap" in terms of progression when compared to the band's debut album.[19] According to Colin Larkin, Closer has since been "deservedly regarded by many critics as the most brilliant rock album of the 80s"; Larkin himself found the record flawless, writing in his Encyclopedia of Popular Music (2011) that it showed Joy Division at their creative peak and "maturity in every area" of their music.[22] In his review of the 2007 reissue of the album, Pitchfork critic Joshua Klein described the album as "even more austere, more claustrophobic, more inventive, more beautiful and more haunting than its predecessor", calling it "Joy Division's start-to-finish masterpiece; a flawless encapsulation of everything the group sought to achieve."[14]</div><div></div><div></div><div>Closer has been highly acclaimed, and is often cited as Joy Division's finest work, being considered by music critics such as Mark Fisher to be "the crown jewel of post-punk"[9] and receiving praise from artists such as George Michael.[34] The album was voted number 1 in the 1980 Albums of the Year poll conducted by music magazine NME,[35] and would be listed as number 157 in Rolling Stone's 2003 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, maintaining the rank in the 2012 revision, and dropping to number 309 in the 2020 edition.[36][37][38][39]</div><div></div><div></div><div>By 1982 Closer had sold over 250,000 copies worldwide, with the posthumous single "Love Will Tear Us Apart" having also sold over 160,000 copies.[40] In 1995 Closer was ranked one of the top 100 alternative albums ever to be released by Spin magazine (placing at number 69).[37][41] In 2002, the American online magazine Pitchfork listed Closer as the 10th best album to be released in the 1980s.[42][37]</div><div></div><div></div><div>The album placed at number 72 on NME's list of the 100 greatest British albums ever to be released.[37] In addition, Q magazine placed Closer at number 8 in a list compiled of the 40 greatest albums to be released in the 1980s.[43][37] In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at number 7 upon their compiled list of the best albums of the 1980s.[37][44] In 2020, Rolling Stone included Closer in their "80 Greatest albums of 1980" list.[45]</div><div></div><div></div><div>It's easy to say, in retrospect, that people should have seen it coming. His marriage was falling apart, his epilesy was worsening, and at their most uplifting, his band's lyrics set new benchmarks for melodrama, paranoia, and depression. "This is the way, step inside," intones Curtis at the start of the group's posthumous sophomore release Closer, an album title whose double meaning imparts almost as much menace as the fact that Curtis already sounds like he's singing from beyond the grave on the sepulchral lead track "Atrocity Exhibition".</div><div></div><div></div><div>And then there's the music, a conflation of tribal primitivism and sophisticated art-rock that set the template for those twin poles of post-punk. A lot of credit goes to eccentric producer Martin Hannett, and it's the production-- not Curtis's well-parsed words or the band's suddenly ubiquitous biopic cachet-- that benefits most extensively from cleaned-up deluxe reissues of the band's two utterly essential albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer. Simply put, the group's debut full-length Unknown Pleasures, released in 1979, sounds like little that came before it. At its most familiar, it vaguely approximates the cold claustrophobia of Iggy's The Idiot or David Bowie's Low, but from the first notes of "Disorder" on, the music is almost as alien as its iconic cover art.</div><div></div><div></div><div>"Twenty Four Hours" briefly tries to pry free from the album's looming inevitability before "The Eternal" and "Decades" draw the music back down and the listener back in to Curtis' world. "The Eternal" is the bleakest thing the band ever recorded, and if "Decades" comes off a relative respite in comparison, the lyrics quickly quash that idea. "We knocked on the doors of Hell's darker chamber," moans Curtis. "Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in."</div><div></div><div></div><div>The re-release of the collection Still is a little more frustrating, especially considering the singles collection Substance-- the only single disc on which you can find "Love Will Tear Us Apart", "Atmosphere", "Transmission", as well as several early tracks, some of Joy Division's most beautiful and brutal work-- is not included in this slate of reissues. (Perhaps the assumption is that older fans already have the awesomely comprehensive Heart and Soul box.) Still, originally released in 1981, a month before the surviving Joy Division members issued their first New Order album, Movement, is a ragged, enigmatic coda, an uneven odds-and-ends collection of lost tracks that fills in some gaps in Joy Division's history and legacy. Yet for a band that recorded so little, it's hard to quibble with the availability of more, especially when that means such songs as the actually uptempo "Ice Age", "The Kill", "Glass" (B-side to "Digital"), the metallic "The Sound of Music", and the immortal "Dead Souls".</div><div></div><div> dd2b598166</div>