Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

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.