ETERNAL (Live)

ETERNAL (Live)

Most people will find the prospect of 13 hours of Joy Division live daunting; for the rest of us wretched, beautiful souls, there’s ETERNAL. Paris 1979 is excellent, but the real highlight of this 16-show anthology is May 1980 at High Hall in Birmingham, just two weeks before 23-year-old singer Ian Curtis’ death by suicide. Here, you can hear the band’s transition from the claustrophobic post-punk of “Transmission” and “She’s Lost Control” to the grandeur of “Twenty Four Hours” and “Ceremony”—the latter of which the band’s surviving members carried over when starting New Order. Listening with the benefit of hindsight, what stands out is just how oddly uplifting the band was in spite of their bleakness—the sound of hanging on, always just barely, desperately, catchily hanging on.

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