{"id":909247,"date":"2026-09-25T15:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T15:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/909247\/"},"modified":"2026-09-25T15:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T15:16:09","slug":"joy-divisions-eternal-live-boxed-set-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/909247\/","title":{"rendered":"Joy Division’s ‘Eternal’ Live Boxed Set: Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFew artists have cast as vast an influence in as short a time as Joy Division<\/a>, the pioneering Manchester post-punk quartet whose dark, haunting songs and sound helped shape many genres and scenes that were to follow, from the obvious \u2014 indie-rock, goth, industrial \u2014 to the less-obvious, like electronic dance music.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet the fact that the group is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame<\/a> this fall \u2014 along with New Order<\/a>, the band Joy Division became after singer Ian Curtis\u2019 suicide in May of 1980 \u2014 is as ironic as the fact that the group is more widely known for T-shirts bearing the cover of its first album, \u201cUnknown Pleasures,\u201d than its music. Joy Division were considered post-rock or even anti-rock at the time, and they vehemently spurned cliches \u2014 at the end of the group\u2019s live cover of the Velvet Underground\u2019s \u201cSister Ray,\u201d Curtis says with withering disdain, \u201cYou should hear our version of \u2018Louie Louie\u2019 \u2014 woah.\u201d While the punk rock scene that spawned them was about overthrowing the bloated rock royalty of the \u201860s and mid-\u201870s, punk was still showy and flamboyant; Joy Division were nothing of the sort. They wore dark, businesslike clothes, had a dark demeanor, a dark sound and even darker lyrics.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is a crisis I knew had to come\/ Destroying the balance I\u2019d kept
Doubting, unsettling and turning around\/ Wondering what will come next<\/p>\n

\n\tIs this the role that you wanted to live? \/ I was foolish to ask for so much
Without the protection and infancy\u2019s guard\/ It all falls apart at first touch\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe sound of Joy Division\u2019s two studio albums, \u201cUnknown Pleasures\u201d and \u201cCloser,\u201d was just as influential as the songs themselves: The band\u2019s brilliant but troubled producer, Martin Hannett, was far more interested in making guitars sound like machinery or a swarm of hornets than, say, a vintage Telecaster. The albums sound otherworldly, with strange sound effects, breaking glass and distant industrial noises embellishing the songs; Curtis\u2019 vocal on the grim passage quoted above is double-tracked, but the second is him literally whispering along with himself, making the verses even more unsettling. Joy Division had no shortage of influences \u2014 the Velvets, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Kraftwerk \u2014 but their albums sound like nothing that had come before.<\/p>\n

\n\tThus, it\u2019s surprising to realize when first hearing Joy Division concert recordings what a bruising, in-your-face rock band they were \u2014 the obscurity in their sound is gone and it\u2019s Bernard Sumner\u2019s snarling guitars, Peter Hook\u2019s bruising bass and Stephen Morris\u2019 thundering drums, with Curtis\u2019 roaring vocals distorting and overwhelming the sound system during the exceptionally loud parts. And you hear a lot of that on \u201cEternal,\u201d the massive new boxed set, which sprawls across 14 CDs and two DVDs, culled from a total of 18 performances (a couple of which are soundchecks) from across the band\u2019s 14-month peak. Several of the recordings suffer from rough sound quality, despite the best efforts of the set\u2019s producers, with just a few offering what the average fan would expect from a live album \u2014 but then again, anyone who\u2019s going this far in is probably well accustomed to such imperfections.<\/p>\n

\n\tSeveral of the shows have been previously released, and nearly all have been available as bootlegs for decades, since they date from the era when virtually every concert in England had at least one person in the audience with a portable cassette recorder who would then sell bootleg tapes in open-air markets \u201cat the week-end\u201d or swap them with other collectors. Most of these recordings come from such methods, although there are a few soundboard cassettes as well as more-professional source recordings. (The concerts from Amsterdam, Birmingham and the Factory in Manchester are the best here in terms of both quality and performance, although there are flaws with each; the DVDs include long-available BBC performances, along with obsessives-only concert and soundcheck videos.) <\/p>\n

\n\tAnd while a 16-disc collection of Joy Division\u2019s music seems like it could be a mental-health hazard, the fact that these are (mostly) energetic concert recordings makes them less grim than a lot of the studio work \u2014 as does the band\u2019s ever-changing setlists, drawing from an unusually large repertoire of original songs for such a young band. They\u2019d be just as likely to open with an obscure instrumental as \u201cLove Will Tear Us Apart\u201d (which was not released until after Curtis\u2019 death) or the dirge-like \u201cI Remember Nothing.\u201d And while they would generally stick to an arrangement once they\u2019d nailed it, there are some surprises here, like a surprisingly uplifting early version of \u201cThe Eternal\u201d with music quite different from the final take, and a stumbling version of \u201cLove Will Tear Us Apart\u201d where Curtis attempts to play rhythm guitar (Sumner is on keyboards) and apparently realizes that he can\u2019t do it and sing at the same time \u2014 he even says at the end, \u201cAs you can tell, we haven\u2019t rehearsed in a while\u201d and then laughs.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut most of all, it\u2019s fascinating hearing the band\u2019s incredible creative burst evolve over the course of just 14 months (the concerts are presented chronologically), across good nights and bad nights, introducing increasingly stunning new songs, creating some of the most beautifully haunting music of their generation \u2026 until one of them couldn\u2019t take it anymore. They were so young \u2014 the eldest members of the band at the time of Curtis\u2019 death were just 24 \u2014 that the sophistication and darkness of the music and especially the lyrics is hard to comprehend. Even their prettiest songs \u2014 \u201cLove Will Tear Us Apart\u201d and \u201cAtmosphere\u201d \u2014 are steeped in despair; \u201cMeans to an End\u201d has a monstrous groove but it\u2019s so menacing that you kind of want to dance to it, but somehow feel you shouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s little question that the most intense set among many in this collection is the band\u2019s final concert, in Birmingham on May 2, 1980, which was initially released on the first posthumous compilation, \u201cStill.\u201d According to reports from audience members, he was in ill health and barely made it through the show, but his performance is harrowing: We hear a 23-year-old man who was two weeks away from taking his own life sing passionately on \u201cNew Dream Fades\u201d: \u201cThe strain\u2019s too much, can\u2019t take much more\/ I\u2019ve walked on water, run through fire\/ Can\u2019t seem to feel it anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs with all such art, it\u2019s impossible to tell whether some of these impressions actually emanate from the work or the ensuing myth, and the knowledge of what was just around the corner. As Simon Armitage writes in the liner notes, if Curtis\u2019s death reinforced Joy Division\u2019s image as funereal and morbid, it also \u201cfixed their legacy in amber,\u201d for better and worse. Small wonder that the pristine and pioneering electronic pop music the three surviving members of Joy Division made as New Order over the following decades featured lyrics and vocals that verged on triteness; they\u2019d seen the other side and presumably had no desire to go there again. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEternal\u201d is clearly aimed at obsessive fans, but it documents the evolution of Joy Division\u2019s brilliance in real time, and includes some of the most beautiful and challenging music of their time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Few artists have cast as vast an influence in as short a time as Joy Division, the pioneering…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":909248,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,158503,341,233704],"class_list":["post-909247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-joy-division","tag-music","tag-new-order"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/909248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}