The best album I’ve discovered on the project so far is Unknown Pleasures, and seeing as I was willing to listen to another James album after I didn’t really enjoy the first one, it made some sort of sense to listen to the second Joy Division album and see  I liked it as much as the first.

I must admit, I am struggling to get into Closer as much as I did Unknown Pleasures.  A quick look around the Internet reveals that this album is genuinely higher rated and better received that its predecessor (even though BOTH are accepted as examples of the best albums ever released).

I really want to hear the reasons (for myself) as to why Closer is the better album, but I can’t. I’m not sure if it’s because I think Unknown Pleasures is one of the finest albums ever released or I had unrealistic expectations.

I feel the only way that I am going to do that is to take this album completely separately and try to forget the ‘hype .

The first point is that this album can be summed as “”the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. The album is brilliant when taken as one whole, but I feel the songs lose a little bit of their charm when taken away from the album and played on their own. There are no “Love Will Tear Us Apart‘s” on this album.

However for an album with only 9 tracks, there are more than a couple of highlights. Isolation is a brilliant track that sounds like it would have sounded much more at home on Unknown Pleasures, it’s baseline and synths are brilliant and are to me define Joy Division’s sound, and is by far my favorite track on the album

A Means to an End sounds very similar (in part) to Editor’s All Sparks and it’s quite clear where the main Editors influence comes from.

Twenty Four Hours and The Eternal are two of the best tracks I’ve heard on this discovery of music but they  really leave me finding it hard to say anything about Joy Division I haven’t already said.

I like this album, I loved Unknown Pleasures. This album is very much a Joy Division Album and I think the songs here are just as good as anything else that they produced, but I’m still failing to see how history has deemed it the better of the two albums. Closer is a great album, but Unknown Pleasures is one of the best.

This album is very atmospheric and a lot more ‘moody’ than the first album. Given that this album came out just after Ian Curtis’s suicide, to fans hearing his voice on the album, at the time, it must have been heart wrenching as his unhappiness unfolds over the course of the album.

Again I think its another album I’ve listened to far too late and its cultural impact at the time of release, continues to precede the album itself. It’s not always about the music after all.

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