Joy Division
Eternal
RHINO
Though their crepuscular songs were a beloved, haunted part of our diet since their start, you didn’t see Joy Division—not unless you lived beyond the borders of the United States and were alive before singer-lyricist Ian Curtis’ 1980 passing. All you could ever hope for regarding the live noisescapes of the post-punk group were occasional tinny soundboard efforts and beyond-messy, low-fidelity bootlegs. That is, until this career-ranging 16-disc (including two DVDs) Eternal box set, which, interestingly—valuably, even—continues to lay flat the sound of Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris at its most raw and unadorned.
There are, of course, other live Joy Division albums out there, most famously Les Bains Douches 18 December 1979—a French radio broadcast first released in 2001. Clandestine show recordings such as Iggy & the Stooges’ Metallic K.O. and the Velvets’ Live at Max’s Kansas City are essential to the primal punk canon for their crude energy and illustration, yet, Les Bains Douches’s 16 unvarnished non-productions embodied all of that dark vigor and bleak verve combined—only more so. With that collection and other previously released live efforts included in the Eternal box (plus a brand new DVD edit of Joy Division - A Film by Malcolm Whitehead), the focus here is on the recently discovered volumes such as an Anchor show and an Acklam Hall gig—both from 1979, both in London, and both primarily audience-recorded by Jonathan Crabb—along with two 1980 London dates from varied recording sources.
Though there’s a built up sonic confidence and mutual interplay still recognizable through the murky unfidelity’s din on everything from “Leaders of Men” to “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” your laser focus goes to Curtis’ distant, robo-raw bass-baritone delivery, to his tone poems of alienation and dislocation—a bone-rattled display that would’ve risen Jim Morrison and his distress from the dead. If, like Curtis’ hero William S. Burroughs once noted, there’s nothing here now but the recordings, the boxed finds of Eternal—gathered as one with other fuzzy-headed captures of Joy Division at their post-punk peak—are worth the cost and the strain of trying to hear every last gasp and death rattle.
