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Joy Division - Closer (Collectors Edition) [1980/2013]
 Expanded with a second disc featuring the band live at University of London
 FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time - 96:03 minutes | 1,82 GB + 365 MB
Official Digital Download - Source: HDTracks.com | Front cover

 U.K. post-punk icons, Joy Division, had an immense and profound impact on contemporary music. Closer is their acclaimed gothic-rock masterpiece. Released in 1980, the album was NME’s “Album of the Year.” Produced by Martin Hannett, the recording continues where the first album left off with standouts including “Heart And Soul,” “Isolation” and “Twenty Four Hours”.

Chart History/Awards:
 - One of Pitchfork’s “Best Albums of the 1980s”.
- One of Slant Magazine’s “Best Albums of the 1980s”.
- One of Q’s “Forty Best Albums of the 1980s”.
- One of Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.
- AllMusic.com - 5 out of 5 stars.

 In retrospect, Closer, the second and final album by this Mancunian band, seems to point straight at singer Ian Curtis's suicide, which happened a few months before it was released. The band's reverberating mesh of minor-key lines and Curtis's bass voice are gloomy enough on their own, and attention to the words reveals references to blacker-than-black stories by JG Ballard and Joseph Conrad; the void and its terrors were splitting Curtis apart from the inside. "I put my trust in you," he sings, and his voice leaves no doubt that that trust has been betrayed. But the music, grim and powerful as it is, points to the direction the surviving members took as New Order, incorporating the mechanical gravity of club rhythms.


 If Unknown Pleasures was Joy Division at their most obsessively, carefully focused, ten songs yet of a piece, Closer was the sprawl, the chaotic explosion that went every direction at once. Who knows what the next path would have been had Ian Curtis not chosen his end? But steer away from the rereading of his every lyric after that date; treat Closer as what everyone else thought it was at first -- simply the next album -- and Joy Division's power just seems to have grown. Martin Hannett was still producing, but seems to have taken as many chances as the band itself throughout -- differing mixes, differing atmospheres, new twists and turns define the entirety of Closer, songs suddenly returned in chopped-up, crumpled form, ending on hiss and random notes. Opener "Atrocity Exhibition" was arguably the most fractured thing the band had yet recorded, Bernard Sumner's teeth-grinding guitar and Stephen Morris' Can-on-speed drumming making for one heck of a strange start. Keyboards also took the fore more so than ever -- the drowned pianos underpinning Curtis' shadowy moan on "The Eternal," the squirrelly lead synth on the energetic but scared-out-of-its-wits "Isolation," and above all else "Decades," the album ender of album enders. A long slow crawl down and out, Curtis' portrait of lost youth inevitably applied to himself soon after, its sepulchral string-synths are practically a requiem. Songs like "Heart and Soul" and especially the jaw-dropping, wrenching "Twenty Four Hours," as perfect a demonstration of the tension/release or soft/loud approach as will ever be heard, simply intensify the experience. Joy Division were at the height of their powers on Closer, equaling and arguably bettering the astonishing Unknown Pleasures, that's how accomplished the four members were. Rock, however defined, rarely seems and sounds so important, so vital, and so impossible to resist or ignore as here.  


Tracklist:

 Disc 01 #01 - Atrocity Exhibition
 Disc 01 #02 - Isolation
 Disc 01 #03 - Passover
 Disc 01 #04 - Colony
 Disc 01 #05 - A Means To An End
 Disc 01 #06 - Heart And Soul
 Disc 01 #07 - Twenty Four Hours
 Disc 01 #08 - The Eternal
 Disc 01 #09 - Decades