Unknown Pleasures

Joy Division | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Qwest / Wea
• ASIN: B000002LGL
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Music
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (147 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #55,235 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Disorder

2. Day Of the Lords

3. Candidate

4. Insight

5. New Dawn Fades

6. She's Lost Control

7. Shadowplay

8. Wilderness

9. Interzone

10. I Remember Nothing

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

170 of 186 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars into darkness; into creation October 27, 2000

By "undeletablearchive"

Format:Audio CD

Joy Division's `Unknown Pleasures' arrived in 1979 without warning or fanfare. Product inwards, this group was immediately different: austere, minimal graphics; monochrome, formal clothes; ascetic, modernist titles. And then there's the music, whose beauty, power, and long-term importance is hard to measure. In 1979, many things didn't exist in rock, and Joy Division, with this record, brought them into being. First, the idea that rock music could express emotions other than drugs, rebellion, youth, love: `Unknown Pleasures', for the first time in rock, expands the palette to include sadness, murderousness, self-hatred, despair; without apology, without embarrassment - like the entry of Greek Tragedy onto the rock stage. Without this, no Nirvana. No Husker Du. No Metallica, even. Second, an entirely new vocabulary. Melodic, dolorous bass, treated as a lead instrument. Baritone vocals, harsh, deep and dramatic, but with no interest in theatrics. Metronomic, disinterested percussion. Textural, ambient guitar that also bites, warps, and attacks. Third, production-as-aesthetic. The sound emerges out of inky blackness, prismatic like shards of broken glass: Noise and noise effects are as important as structure. Many genres and many bands owe their existence and their careers to the simultaneous, unprecedented innovations this record makes. It is as groundbreaking and original - if not more - as Revolver, Axis: Bold as Love, Fun House, or Ziggy Stardust, in whose company it should be kept. In other words, a fundamental, utterly essential work for any rock music enthusiast.

What about the songs? A brief glimpse into two key tracks (my favourites): `Shadowplay' follows some kind of imagined urban murder, charging through neon-lit darkness on the back of Albrecht's guitar: alternatively chordally violent, or flying through systemic solos that cycle like Reich or Glass. This will make your heart beat faster. `New Dawn Fades' starts up with bits of backward guitar-detritus, turning left into a requiem sung by a 20-year-old for his own life. It is utterly resigned and moving, and that would be enough; but towards its end it shifts up a gear and climaxes like no other song in rock; like despair finally expiated. Again, this one will have your hair standing up. Possibly the greatest single song in all of rock music, `New Dawn Fades' hits you with the Shock of the New. All these years later, it simply sounds thrown out of the void at us, fully-formed and totally unprecedented, and new with the original hurt every time. (Perhaps the nearest relative is `Tomorrow Never Knows'.)

Unknown Pleasures is new-minted like nothing else in rock, utterly astonishing, and timeless. Off the scale in terms of creativity, emotional expression, dynamics, and the power to excite and rejuvenate, this record does everything a rock record has to do to be called classic, and then goes way further: into darkness; into creation.

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Hugely Influential to Modern Music July 10, 2003

By Un Anglophile

Format:Audio CD

Joy Division, originally called Warsaw, was formed in 1977 by a group of Mancunian lads (Ian Curtis, Bernard Albrecht [later changed to Sumner], Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris) that were hugely influenced by Bowie, Iggy Pop, and the punk-rock explosion that was engulfing Britain in the late `70s led by the Sex Pistols and the Clash. After teaming up with Tony Wilson's Factory label and with producer Martin Hannett, they released "Unknown Pleasures" in 1979. Little did they know that they were changing music forever.

The end result is an album that combines Albrecht's discordant punk guitar riffs with Curtis' ever-present brooding tension and monotone deep voice, that can be exhilarating at one moment and the voice of doom the next. The album's opener "Disorder" combines all of these, along with Morris' fast drumming and Hook's never-ending bass hooks. "I'm looking for a guy to take me by the hand" Curtis explains, rushed and almost carefree. The next track, "Day of the Lords" proves almost to be the complete opposite, where the drums have slowed down, the guitars are lower, and Curtis sings like the town crier announcing the end of the world.

Some of the songs on "Unknown Pleasure" have a slower pace rather than the frantic quality many other bands at the period had, which made Joy Division be labeled as "post-punk" to the British music press; the guitar, bass and drums could still surprise you with pounding riffs, but could also march along at much slower paces. But even in the slower songs, like "Candidate" or "New Dawn Fades," the instruments, despite being slower and quieter, echoed and give a general eerie and brooding feeling that might be distant but is still ever-present. To add this all together with Curtis' nihilistic vocals and British working-class pessimism, the songs can become four minute-long journeys through closed factories, failed economics, bleak connected-house neighborhoods and dismantled relationships that were plaguing late '70s Britain--a time when many punk groups were crying out in bold capitals No Future. We hear occasionally distant samples of breaking glass, shut doors and footsteps leading to nowhere. Some of the true gems of this album, as well as in Joy Division's entire career, like "She's Lost Control" or "Shadowplay" combine these themes and are truly memorable. Even though the group later claimed that producer Hannett ruined their sound on "Unknown Pleasures," to listeners the music and moods are perfect; dark, but never dark enough to make you turn away.

Sadly, singer Ian Curtis killed himself in mid-1980 before completing the group's second and last album "Closer." The survivors later joined together and created New Order, who virtually created modern dance and rave music in the '80s and '90s. Meanwhile, Joy Division itself became credited with influencing the Gothic scene in music. Although influential on many goth and later indie rock, Brit-pop and alternative groups, the group never intended to be "goth." Joy Division was coming from an England where the Sex Pistols had broken up, where Thatcherism and the Tories was bringing new meaning to carelessness, where the Falklands War was just on the horizon, unemployment and worker unrest was acute, and skinheads were frighteningly becoming more popular. Certainly, there's no bats, vampires or haunted castles here. Instead, these are songs that come from the industrial grime and nihilism of Manchester circa 1979, with a tortured working-class bloke trying to make sense out of his life. One listen to "She's Lost Control" confirms all of this.

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Not really unreleased material October 29, 2007

By A. Gerritz

Format:Audio CD

BEWARE! If you already own the Heart and Soul box set, then you already own all but 2 of the tracks on this 2 CD set, since Unknown Pleasures is included in its entirety on the box set, and the first 10 tracks on Disc 4 are 10 of the 12 tracks on the bonus live CD. The 2 tracks not on the box set are Shadowplay (in fact previously unreleased from this gig), and Transmission, previously available on the 1988 Atmosphere CD single and on one of the 1995 Love Will Tear Us Apart CD singles. Still a good gig. Actual date and location were The Factory, Hulme, Manchester, July 13, 1979.