Day 73: Joy Division – Closer

Wherein I have the daunting task of saying anything clever about one of the most lavishly praised albums in recording history.

Joy Division is one of those bands that for me, despite never having heard more than two of their songs, is so firmly tied to a feeling that it can be hard to appreciate them from without it. That feeling, of course, is sheer, overwhelming depression. However, I know that impression is influenced by having seen Control and seeing the layers of tragedy Curtis would knead into his life, the terrible things he did to the people who cared about him and to himself.

It’s almost too bad that it’s so hard to see Joy Division beyond Curtis, but it’s hard to imagine them without him. (Note: No, I haven’t really listened to New Order, and that ‘really’ is only because that song of theirs that Orgy covered was on the radio a lot when I was young.) I should listen to them for comparison, because I really do wonder how much of the dismal atmosphere of Closer is due to Curtis’ temperament.

Having listened to Closer quite a bit today, I do finally see more of a nuance to the music than I did previously. Joy Division may have been collectively slung with Curtis’ albatross, but the band reacted as a whole against it: The musicians play from opposing sides of some great schism, the instruments reflecting Curtis far too well in their seeming inability to play in anything but lugubrious tones, yet being inspired to use these tones to try to wrest themselves free of this very sadness. Ultimately, that’s what gave Curtis his appeal, too. He sang of shame in “Isolation” but with a strange enthusiasm about it, carrying off a line like “Mother I tried please believe me/I’m doing the best that I can/I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through/I’m ashamed of the person I am” without sounding self-pitying, instead sounding wearied but fully alive. He continues, “But if you could just see the beauty/These things I could never describe/These pleasures a wayward distraction/This is my one lucky prize.”

I’m really glad to say that this album is awesome and that Curtis is the last reason why. Musically, this thing is just spectacular. Every song sounds different, yet all are consistent. It’s a perfect album, where every song fits like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s refreshing to hear something where there’s not one weak moment, nothing inspiring a Next.

Also, on the “discovering old favorites’ origins” note: Interpol, you guys are fucking shameless. I still love you, though.

Day 53: Junior Kimbrough – You Better Run

Reading about Blues music is almost more entertaining than listening to Blues music. In Kimbrough’s case, even just the album titles are awesome: “Sad Days, Lonely Nights”, “Most Things Haven’t Worked Out“, and “God Knows I Tried.”  However, in Kimbrough’s case, the music actually takes the forefront.

Kimbrough’s is a style of blues akin to RL Burnside‘s, and in fact they hailed from the same area and were on the same label. Their two families played on each others’ records often. But Kimbrough puts his own stank on the blues, charging his songs with desperation and nerve, telling grisly, inhuman tales at some times, and begging the universe to take it easy on him at others. The music underpinning every song shimmers with misery, and it sounds like the guitars themselves sound traumatized, like they have been pawned and redeemed dozens of times.

The best part of the album is, for me, just that concentrated discord. The music, even without the words, is a tour of a godforsaken world in which no one the narrator encounters has a soul. Consider the lyrics to “You Better Run“:

You know
One day I was in the park
I see a girl come running up to the car
She ran up to the car
She said, “Mr.”
Said, “Would you get me home”
I said, “What’s wrong with you, Baby?”
She said, “That man gotta knife”
Said, “He tryin to rape me”

You better run
Don’t let him get you
You better run
Don’t let him get you
If he catch you, Babe
He gonna rape you

Yeah
An’ on the way home
I said, “Baby,
You might still get raped”
She said, “Mr. Junior,”
Said “You don’t have to rape me;
Cos I love you”

These are actually the lyrics to an actual song. And the song is played as a relatively light-hearted affair. That’s what’s fascinating about the worldview portrayed here: For him this tale passes as a Meet Cute. Listening to the song you can imagine him telling this story to his grandkids while smoking a cigar.

There’s something endearing about these old bluesmen. I’m a sucker for a good toiling-in-obscurity-only-to-be-recognized-posthumously story. It makes me feel like no matter how poorly things in my life go, the work I leave behind might be beloved by some future generation with radically different standards from this one. And goddamn if that don’t make me feel nice.

Day 45: Nick Drake – Bryter Layter

Oh, my.

Here’s a good example of how important context can be when it comes to first impressions. I had only encountered Nick Drake in two soundtrack appearances: “One of These Things First” in Garden State, and “Fly” in The Royal Tenenbaums. Both songs were colored by their placement in the movie, and the tone of the story, and in both cases the movie ended up giving Drake’s tunes a sour taste for me.

In Garden State, the placement of “One of These Things First” echoes Wes Anderson’s characteristic use of songs, except without a touch of the nuance — the song’s lyrics line up with the curious adventure the protagonist finds himself drawn toward with the pixieish female lead, and the upbeat guitar pattern gives legs to a transitional scene. Neat, effective, and comes across as smug. I don’t remember where exactly “Fly” appears in The Royal Tenenbaums, but in that movie’s case it’s less a case of how the song appears than the movie itself. I love The Royal Tenenbaums, but the whole movie evokes a world that seems unreal; a quaint, insular, tweed-draped romance of eccentric people living in a fantastical brick walk-up in some abandoned corner of what is presumably New York, a world so effectively created that it has a gravity that pulls down any object placed near it. For the same reason I can’t stand hearing Nico or “Needle in the Hay”, hearing Nick Drake just makes me recall Tenenbaums. You’d think that would be a good thing, seeing as, I remind you, I did love that movie — its insistence upon its own aesthetic couldn’t undermine the simplistic brute force of the story and the inspired performances that carried it off — but the movie was so rebarbatively pretentious that anything associated with it has a wretched taint about it forever.

None of this is Nick Drake’s fault, anyway. But it did keep me from ever wanting to hear one of his albums. And as I’m learning more and more throughout the course of this project, I see this was folly, since Bryter Layter would have easily insinuated itself as a treasured piece of my musical experience at just about any point in my life. It says a lot, and says it better than I could here. Most albums I have gotten through in this project have had one or two tracks that I wanted to listen to over and over; this one had four (“At The Chime of a City Clock”, “Hazy Jane I”, “Fly”, and stand-out “Northern Sky”). The whole thing is unbearably pretty, and contains so many little musical jewels that I could quote them like hilarious lines from a movie (the captivatingly expressive piano in “Northern Sky”, the redemption of that most repugnant of instruments, the harpsichord, in “Fly”, the way Drake delivers the line “And now if it’s time for recompense for what’s done, come, come sit down on a fence in the sun” in a talk-sing tone that gives me chills). But moreover, it has a mood and style so definitive that listening to “Fly” now almost makes me wonder if Wes Anderson made a movie around it.

Drake’s suicide paints a grim retrospective picture of this album, but even if Drake had lived to get over feeling “so sorry for himself” (“Poor Boy”) this would have stood as a testament to the tense expressiveness of the depressive mind as it writhes against the chains it binds itself in. A masterpiece.