Movement

Considering that Joy Division singer Ian Curtis hanged himself a day before the band was scheduled to go on their first tour of America, it's hard to believe that the remaining members figured they would amount to anything in particular, let alone become New Order. Measure Movement against the rest of the band’s catalog and it still sounds like an attempt for direction in the wake of tragedy, but take in the broader scope of post-punk circa 1981 and you can hear a new sound taking shape. Curtis’ specter—and Joy Division’s generally—is still obvious and probably inevitable: Both “Truth” and “ICB” could have been on Joy Division’s final album, Closer, without much alteration, while “The Him” mixes the industrial and the ritualistic with a force even Curtis didn’t quite have the stomach for. Then you get tracks like “Chosen Time,” which deploys the rigid tick-tock of disco not just as a metaphor for anxiety, but as something that, y’know, makes people dance, and “Dreams Never End,” which eludes the intensity of Joy Division’s bleakness for something softer, more melancholy than depressed, more passing cloud than black hole—signs of life, stirring in darkness.