Earn This

There’s no post here that could be good enough to justify a co-founder’s several-month absence from this site, so instead of making my first post a mammoth mega-concept-post (I am working on one of those, though), I’ll start with a scattershot of scraps: seven mostly unrelated thoughts on music from this past decade.

1. Kanye is underrated

It’s way too easy to hate on Kanye, with his ALL CAPS BLOG POSTS and “imma let you finish” and his awards show tantrums. The reason I don’t really judge him that much about it is because a) I’m convinced that the majority of Americans underrate the pressures of being a 24/7 celebrity, that they’d have their share of meltdowns if given virtually infinite money and respect only to have it periodically taken away, and b) down to a T, each one of his errors is caring too much about something instead of caring too little. He doesn’t get caught with a prostitute. He inarticulately addresses race issues.

The difference between Kanye and other mildly-respected-but-still-love-to-bash-em musician shipwrecks (e.g. Britney, Amy Winehouse, Chris Brown) is that Kanye has visionary talent, an enormous work ethic (four meticulous albums in seven years), and a generational-potentially-historic career that could very well be in its infancy or, at worst, its adolescence.

Maybe “underrated” isn’t the right word, as he’s getting a lot of end-of-year and end-of-decade love on countdowns and recaps. Maybe “overhated” and “underappreciated artistically.” Kanye is very much an auteur – someone who has a clear voice, someone who represents yet transcends his influences, someone who has impeccable intuition even if quirks and miscalculations speckle his oeuvre. Honestly, I don’t care if he carries himself like a love-hungry baby as long as his music continues to bristle with passion unmatched in hip-hop.

There are a few pieces of evidence I could use in my Kanye-as-genre-defining-auteur case, but I’ll just bring up this one. Ask me if you want more. I have them ready.

808s and Heartbreaks. Most critics gave it love, and a few of its singles had Top 40 traction. (I like it a lot but don’t adore it. It’s maybe an 8.08 out of 10.) Still, a lot of people turned their nose up at it as lazy, uninteresting, trendy. How completely far from the truth.

It came from Kanye’s desire to prove that he wasn’t just a competent beatmaker, that he’s something special and timeless and has actual inspiration. (Of course, anyone who had listened closely to his albums and observed his skill at combining unlikely sounds into something that sounds natural and soulful would already have known this.)

To do this, he ironically chose the most trendy and bashable of instruments: auto-tune. Far from following the flock, as it might appear, he reminded us that auto-tune just an instrument/tool and not a movement, that it can sound good or bad depending on how skillful and artful its user is. Listen to the album: it’s careful and nuanced and deep in a way that T-Pain and Chris Brown aren’t and can never be.

This album epitomizes Kanye’s essence: paradoxical, unexpected, and slightly ironic. He makes a claim for respectability using auto-tune. He redefines gangsta rap while wearing a polo shirt. He moves the tough, beat-driven hip-hop industry forward by sampling old-school, vocal-based music. He’s rap’s biggest baby and its hardest worker. That any of this actually works at once defies all logic and gives you an “a-HA!” moment: of course that’s how it would happen.

(Semi-tangent: His debut album is the one getting all the love, which is a bit of a shame considering it’s probably his weakest and is about 40% skits and novelties. I’ll give to the publications calling it one of the best, if not the best, album of the decade that it was the first and that it set a new formula, so it might be among the most influential (though he did similar stuff producing Jay-Z’s The Blueprint, an adored album whose success is deeply indebted to Kanye). But it’s not the best. That would be Late Registration.)

2. Here’s to the Night might be the least romantic romance song ever

Do you care about the band Eve 6? You should. They’re better than you think they are. Just because they have a little bit of a Gimmick (talking really fast) doesn’t mean they make bad music. Their best stuff is so far past gimmick status, I’m offended if you call them a gimmick band. They don’t even talk that fast on most of the songs on their third and final album.

Anyways, Here’s to the Night off of their sophomore Horrorscope became one of their biggest hits as a tearjerking graduation hug-your-acquaintances-and-tell-them-you-love-them ballad. It has the sound of a great, timeless love song. It’s got some real whoppers of lines in there: “Don’t let me let you go” – “Here’s to the tears you knew you’d cry” – “Tomorrow’s gonna come too soon.” It has violins. We’re talking heavy duty emotional waterworks and sap here.

…But take a careful look at the complete lyrics. Read them all the way through, and think about what he’s saying. He’s talking about a drunk hook-up! What!? “Put your name on the line, along with place and time.” “Are you willing to be had? Are you cool with just tonight?”

This had to be intentional. Somebody dared them to make the most romantic-sounding song about a one night stand they could. It’s like Every Breath You Take – a beautiful ballad that’s actually about stalking someone. The Police later admitted that, yeah, they wanted to see how many people would make a stalker song their first married dance. Eve 6 was just carrying the torch.

3. Speaking of Eve 6, It’s All In Your Head is phenomenal

One of my picks for album of the decade is It’s All In Your Head, Eve 6′s third and final album. I’ve already written a rambly, subpar post on Earn This about how much I love this album and why, track for track, it’s one of the best of the aughts. So I won’t elaborate too much here.

There’s a chance that it’s over-calculated as an edgy, Kid A, In Utero attempt at darkness and low accessibility. But I’ve listened to it enough to know that, even if it is calculated, it isn’t noticeable to any extent that it might bother me.

If I had to take a guess, it’s that Collins wrote a few songs, realized, wow, this is pretty heavy compared to our usual, and then just ran with it. He convinced the band and the producers to make it sound slightly experimental and uneven. Whaddya know, it worked.

The tension that led up to Eve 6′s break-up after their third album probably helped make It’s All In Your Head great, but I can’t help but wonder how high the band might’ve soared if they had a chance to stick together and develop a voice.

What a great transition opportunity!

4. Relient K is the most improved band of the decade

Relient K – absolutely one of my favorite bands ever already, and they still have plenty of recording life left – started the aughts making puddle-shallow Christian pop. Their 2000 self-titled debut shows a knack for a decent melody, but that’s about it. The lyrics have little wit, the harmonies are lacking, and the songs are pretty derivative. Okay, Softer to Me is the album’s faint glimmer of ambition, but that’s all.

Their follow-up The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek (2001) is an enormous step up in every way. The songs are better, the sound is better, the lyrics are smarter, the tones are more textured and diverse. It’s still relatively generic, but at least it’s decent filler. There are a few gag-inducing puns, but a classic song or two nonetheless.

I’ll compare Relient K’s career to The Beatles’. The self-titled debut is like the band’s early shows on the Liverpool bar scene where they build their chops. The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek is like Please Please Me or With the Beatles: inconsistent but promising, even if it doesn’t signal at all where the band is headed; fun at the time, but ultimately insignificant besides a few songs once the “real” albums start coming

Their third album, Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right… But Three Do (2003), is like a cross between Rubber Soul and A Hard Day’s Night. It’s secretly Relient K’s most enjoyable work, rooted in their early sound and technique with a few flourishes and flirtations of a more complex, ambitious, serious craft. But most people look a few albums ahead in “best of” discussions, even if this earlier stuff will probably age just as well.

Two Lefts is one of my few favorite albums ever. I won’t elaborate too much since we’re working on Top Albums posts and it’ll be featured there, but it’s the perfect balance of spirituality and fun. It doesn’t go for the jugular, but uses a few playful little images as a lens for some pretty serious themes. It’s a great transition album: forward-thinking and backwards-reflecting, feet effectively in both camps.

On Mmhmm (2005), their fourth album, the band got a major contract and released a loaded, serious work that is my runner-up favorite by the band. It features their two best songs to date — possibly top three or four.  The album is like Revolver in that it’s a bold statement and the big, fearless leap into something bigger than the band was before. (The album is not like Revolver in that it’s not particularly kaleidoscopic or diverse.)

The next album and leap forward was Five Score and Seven Years Ago (2007). It’s bizarrely parallel to Sgt. Pepper’s: the songs aren’t quite as consistently good as the previous album’s, but the album’s sound is more diverse and striking. The highs are mighty high, the lows are still pretty good, and the album ends in a dramatic, existence-contemplating epic (A Day In the Life for Sgt. Pepper’s and Deathbed for Five Score).

The Beatles-Relient K analogy keeps on working: Relient K/The Beatles’ next project is a slightly indulgent if entertaining side effort, Magical Mystery Tour/The Bird and the Bee Sides. It’s only debatably a “real” album, but it helps the band further develop its voice. It’s good, but slightly secondary. The following album is probably better as a result of the band getting more practice here.

The Bird and the Bee Sides also has shades of The White Album, in that the voices of each one of the band members’ voices is heard and the album is overstuffed and really broad.

Finally, we get to Relient K’s 2009 release, Forget and Not Slow Down. There’s no good Beatles comparison here. It’s far too meticulous and conceptual to be RK’s White Album, and it’s not a polished semi-throwback (Abbey Road) or an underwhelming collapse album (Let It Be).

Instead, it shows the band at an impeccable craft and new experimental high. I love that they’re making music like they really want to make the best album possible. It sounds like they really believe that their fans deserve a full-hearted, open-minded effort. They trust us to judge on quality, not familiarity. It’s a contemplative album that effortlessly swerves between dark and feather-light. There’s a hint of Dark Side of the Moon here in the way the album reprises itself and freely flows from beginning to end.

What I miss from the album is that sound from Two Lefts like they were just hanging out and having fun. The hunger for the band to be great has grown and grown and swallowed the band’s original playfulness. But I’ll take hungry and brilliant over playful and predictable any day.

I worry that the band has hit their ceiling, but then again, I’ve had that concern since Mmhmm, and the band hasn’t stepped down from any challenge yet. A bigger concern for me is that some money-hungry executive will shoot down the band’s next big leap because it’s “uncommercial” or some nonsense like that. Keep on keepin’ on Relient K.

(I’ve talked enough about Relient K for one post, but I just want to add that I’m really looking forward to their probably-inevitable throwback phase when they sound like they did around Two Lefts or Anatomy, and make their best album ever. I’m predicting a top five hit on the rock charts and overdue renewed public interest in their career by 2016.)

5. I wish Taylor Swift was my older sister

I’m guessing you haven’t listened to Fearless, Taylor’s second album. It’s teeny-bopper country pop that’s surprisingly good. Her voice is greatly enhanced by digital wizardry so that she sounds like a young Shania Twain.

…Except, Shania Twain is a cowgirl and a tease in a leather skirt. She sounds better with a lite dance beat behind her or syrupy mega-ballad production in front of her.

Taylor is a genuinely good-hearted young lady. She sounds best pouring her heart out with a few understated violins and guitars as accompaniment. She writes or co-writes every one of her songs. Unlike the Jo Bros and Miley, who will record whatever type of music is necessary for them to sell millions, and who strike the iron when it’s hot so much that the album to year ratio is greater than one.

Taylor Swift is more patient and has more of a vision. She’s slowly reclaiming a rap generation for country music. Most impressive of all, she’s doing this while preaching sound character, chastity, and genuine concern for mankind.

She’s clearly nice and hard-working. I’ll overlook her People Magazine romances – one of the Jonases and a Twilight guy – and presume her real personality is like the one she sings. If not, she puts on a good show, because her interviews make her seem simply delightful.

She’d be the ideal older sister: A good role model with a congenial personality and a great intuition for living life with character. She knows hard work and a savvy approach gets results. I would do well to have an influence like that in my life. (Don’t betray me, Taylor. I don’t want to have to eat these words when your cell phone nude pics leak or you get sent to the hospital for binge drinking.)

6. My favorite Green Day album isn’t by Green Day

Foxboro Hot Tubs: What a gaudy band name, as wonderfully bad as any Journey song. That’s what the Green Day guys named their side project in 2007 when they released the album Stop Drop and Roll!!! to a “meh” from most critics.

I’m with Stephen Thomas Erlewine, though. It provides a compelling alternate history where they pursue their Kinks fetish from Warning to garage rock levels, falling head over heels for a half dozen other British hallmark bands along the way. This is what Green Day could’ve become if they didn’t want to be, you know, serious and all. The craft and polish from 21st Century Breakdown and American Idiot are there, but the arena ambition isn’t.

Okay, it might not be quite as good as American Idiot, I’ll begrudgingly admit, but it provides an answer for a tantalizing “what if” — as in, “What if Green Day never grew weary of being an underrated punching bag for critics?”

My biggest complaint about the album is that they didn’t blow it up to Definitely Maybe level of making every song good enough for the album to pass as a greatest hits package.

7. Ska’s afterlife rules

For better and worse, the ska movement died with Bradley Nowell. There was a hit here or there for the next couple years, but by the turn of the century, it was no longer cool to sing about romancing and drugging and farting to a sped-up reggae beat, like Reel Big Fish and Sublime and No Doubt and The Bosstones and Less Than Jake so valiantly had.

But as soon as the genre that made critics gag found its resting place, something great happened. People making ska either quit if they were lousy/in it for a buck, or they stopped trying to make songs they thought would sell and started making songs they thought were good.

The rise of what I will call ska’s fourth wave, even though it’s more the drag-back from the third wave, includes Rx Bandits, Streetlight Manifesto, The Slackers, and Big D and the Kids Table. Now the music has found ways to be forward-thinking while still remaining loyal to the traits that define their genre. It’s a bit underground and doesn’t sell many records, but darn if it isn’t some good music.

I would expand on why it’s so good, but I’ve been writing for a few hours now, and I’m hungry. Plus, I have the sudden urge to go turn on Streetlight Manifesto’s Everything Goes Numb. You should go do that too.

So, suffice to say, if you like music featuring impressive craft, substance, and some brains, and you have a soft spot for the ska backbeat like I do, then you would do well to investigate ska’s fourth wave.

Rating: two and a half stars (out of four)

Painted with a hunched sensitivity, somehow avoiding melodrama but nevertheless evincing other damaging flaws, Brothers almost manages to succeed by doing basically nothing.  This is a tremendously delicate film, low on plot and heavy on pondering, and one that acts as though it’s afraid to ever get to its core issues.  You’ll probably leave it trying to figure out if it’s as profound as it purports to be.

Remaking a Danish film from all of 4 years ago, Brothers will likely remind some of Pearl Harbor (not usually a good thing) with the love triangle that (sort of) develops between its three leads.  Soldier Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) prepares for another duty in Afghanistan as the film opens; meanwhile, his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) has just been released from prison.  Sam’s doting wife Grace (Natalie Portman) tries to reassure their young kids, while the brothers’ father (Sam Shepard) generally beams at Sam and scowls at Tommy.  After Sam is presumed dead abroad, Tommy starts helping out Grace with child-rearing and general house maintenance, quickly abandoning the bad boy persona about which we never really learned much anyway.  A hint of a romance ignites just in time for Sam’s return home, at which point he—of course—is ‘never the same.’

On paper this sounds painfully overwrought, but, to its credit, Brothers never feels that way.  I observed several scenes, especially towards the beginning, that could have very easily delved into melodrama and kept their toes short of that line.  The story even surprised me a few times, especially in what happens between Tommy and Grace and in its rather abrupt and unconventional ending.  Behind the boards is director Jim Sheridan, who (granted, with substantial help from Daniel Day-Lewis) made the excellent films In the Name of the Father and The Boxer (and the respectable My Left Foot), and even where David Benioff’s script leaves gaps, Sheridan’s too committed to the material to give up.

That said, too many knots formed in my mind when I approached admiration afterwards.  First and foremost, I couldn’t get past the idea that every single character fits nicely and tidily into his or her Hollywood box.  There’s the black sheep brother who immediately redeems himself when necessary, the devoted son turned wounded soldier, the emotionally distant and slightly alcoholic father whose feelings for his kids couldn’t be more dichotomous, the grieving widow—and these eye-role-inducing stereotypes extend all the way down to the overly cute children who say things that ones of their age would never, ever utter.

These simplicities keep the film from achieving liftoff.  The set-up, since it’s handled with compassion, inspires interest.  It looks wonderful, with warm and pretty cinematography.  But there’s something distinctly missing.  In its rush to avoid melodrama, Brothers doesn’t achieve drama.  The questions surfacing between the three main characters don’t ever really get addressed, by themselves or anyone else.  The film lacks momentum, spending too much time on meandering scenes with the children that don’t go anywhere.  That surprising last scene is fine, by itself, but by that point, you’ll already be looking at the screen with your head turned a little to the side, like a slightly confused puppy.

Because the characters aren’t deep enough, because we don’t sense that Grace and Tommy really have any regrets about whatever happened between them, the threads don’t hold together.  To wit: the not insignificant amount of time paid to Sam’s time in Afghanistan suggests that this subplot must have an intrinsic purpose to the story, must amplify the primary storyline.  Over there, he did something terrible that he regrets and struggles to live with—a state of mind that, one might assume, he can share with the other two characters.  But that’s not really true of them, or at least we never believe that it is.  Despite the vague suggestions of pervasive family turmoil, Grace and Tommy never convince us that they’re particularly regretful or disturbed by any of the turn of events.  That leaves Sam, dangling on his own, possessor of a tangential subplot that doesn’t connect him to the rest of the film as much as it should. 

The actors all reside in the ‘competent’ range, clearly not helped by the thin characterizations.  Portman has done this ‘heartbreakingly sad’ this before (Cold Mountain), and that’s fine, but I couldn’t help wondering throughout the film how much things would have been better with Leonardo DiCaprio as Sam.

All of this said, I don’t have a large problem with Brothers, since you’d be surprised at how few contemporary Hollywood films try to make you think.  But whereas Pearl Harbor beat its love/betrayal storyline to death with embarrassing dialogue, this movie tentatively tiptoes around everything, genially and quietly presenting three well-meaning characters that you might not mind thinking about for a few hours, level of profoundness demonstrated being up to you to decide.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s no greater loss to music than the suicide of Ian Curtis at the age of 23.  There’s no one I’d rather bring back for a couple decades of recording than him.  That’s because the heights reached by him and his band, Joy Division, in their brief existence, are both nearly unmatched by anyone else and also infinitely frustrating for their potential.  Joy Division occupies the second spot on my artist pantheon, trailing only U2, but Bono’s group has the advantage of more material; pound for pound, Joy Division’s sound is the most compelling I’ve ever heard.  To try to imagine if they could have improved over time, as bands often do—my favorite U2 album is their seventh—almost makes my mind hurt.

Lead singer Curtis and his three band mates—Bernard Sumner on guitar, Peter Hook on bass, and Stephen Morris on drums—created the most exquisite, heartbreakingly beautiful music in rock history, all with just two albums and a few singles.  The depths of emotion explored, and the intricacy of the music and production, place them on a level entirely their own.  They grew out of punk (inspired especially by a Sex Pistols concert) but ended up sounding nothing like it—nothing like anything, really.  Working with revolutionary producer Martin Hannett, they slowly and painstakingly brought forth, as Rolling Stone wrote, “as dramatic and severe a rethink of rock’s aesthetic parameters as has ever been envisioned.”

Song for song, debut album Unknown Pleasures evokes similar feelings as watching Sean Penn act—you just feel that the artist inhabits a different level than everyone else.  The immensely talented Hannett amalgamated the individual musical components—Sumner’s icy sheets of guitar; Hook’s high-end, melodic bass; and Morris’s crisp drumming—into a sound so dark and disturbing that it teeters right on the edge of mental insanity.

Hannett added a variety of additional sounds, some musical (keyboards, synthesizers), some not (breaking glass, a creaky elevator rising) to the songs, which faded in slowly, reluctantly, with the pain of despair.  And then they exploded, like someone trying, and failing, to not lose his mind.  Hannett’s production, despite all the elements, allowed the music incredible breathing room, making it sound as though you were staring through an endless tunnel.  Opener “Disorder” may be the best demonstration of this: introducing Morris, Hook, and Sumner, in that order, Hannett makes Hook’s independent bass line and that piercing guitar simultaneously sound like it’s inside your head and miles away, the space echoing even when everything crescendos.

The music is perfectly matched by Curtis, whose suicide just before the band’s first American tour makes his lyrics uncovering the scariest feelings of the human heart all the more penetrating and real.  Ravaged by both epilepsy and an inability to keep minor flaws from consuming him, he inspires little doubt about whether he felt everything that he sang about.  A line from a song off their second album accurately describes his vision: “We knocked on the doors of Hell’s darker chambers / Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in.”  But Curtis explored such despair and resignation with an intelligence and humanity virtually unmatched in music.  He wasn’t just blandly depressed; he was bewildered and intrigued by the vagaries of the human heart, disappointed in his own hypocrisy and failings, and despite it all, hopeful—hopeful for connections that he never found, for the ability to feel something that would get his heart racing.  And he turned his own failings into world-class tragedies, which is probably why he couldn’t stand to carry on.  “New Dawn Fades,” “Shadowplay,” “and I Remember Nothing” are some of the most heart-wrenching depictions of failed connections anyone’s ever sung about.

On “New Dawn Fades,” Hook’s bass comes in like the shadow of someone walking away in slow motion, before Hannett places Sumner’s guitar thick and pervasive on top.  The song unfolds with utterly perfect timing and tension/release, and Curtis chronicles the attempt to make sense of a relationship that one failed in maintaining: “It was me, seeing me this time / Hoping for something else.”  Likewise, “Shadowplay”—an exercise in precision—pairs a vicious guitar with Curtis’s morbid analogies about failed relationships.  These all should be too hard to take, really, but they’re just too well-done to turn away from.

But they will force you to delve into the deepest recesses of your mind.  “Insight,” which uses some of the aforementioned additional sounds to impart tremendous foreboding, fades in with a jolt before Hannett turns up the volume on Hook’s bass line that sounds like a death march.  Curtis sighs, “Guess your dreams always end / They don’t rise up, just descend…I’m not afraid, not at all / I watch them all as they fall / But I remember when we were young.”  On this song, he’s under control, lamenting the loss of innocence, but on the breathtaking climaxes of “Disorder,” “Day of the Lords” and “New Dawn Fades,” he sounds as though he’s about to burst.  The music joins him: the ending of “Shadowplay,” for one, evinces their typically exceptional use of dynamics.

The album closes with just as absorbing and disquieting a note, the funereal “I Remember Nothing,” with Curtis’s vents—“Violent, more violent, his hand cracked the chair / Moves on reaction, then slumps in despair”—fading away into the remembrance of those unusual sounds.

Amazingly, Unknown  Pleasures would have been even better with the inclusion of “Atmosphere,” one of several non-album singles Joy Division released that are captured on the 1988 compilation Substance.  On the best, including “Transmission,” Hannett’s production acquires even more prominence.  And by the time the band wrote “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” Curtis had begun to have an affair with a Belgian journalist following the band.  “Love,” their only real pop song, became their biggest hit, and while it’s not their most musically complicated song, Curtis’s lyrics provide some of the most achingly real depictions of failed love ever set to music: “Did you cry out in your sleep, all my failings exposed? / There’s a taste in my mouth, as desperation takes hold / That something so good just can’t function no more / And love will tear us apart again.”

Curtis’s thoughts were beginning to presage the end, but there was still another album to come.  Closer, the group’s second and final LP, initially doesn’t sound quite so dark as its predecessor.  Lyrically, it’s even heavier, but the songs don’t all sound quite so oppressive, quite so much like you’re standing in an attic wondering what’s around the corner.  “Atrocity Exhibition,” though a mostly failed experiment, breaks free from Unknown Pleasures; and the riveting “Isolation,” namely, is the closest they came to foreshadowing what New Order sounded like.

But as the album progresses, it feels as though we’re walking through the final stages of Curtis’s life, his problems slipping inexorably out of his control and his outlook fading inexorably bleaker.  And the songs are no less devastating than before, once more expertly written, expertly produced.  The fatalistic lamentations make it almost impossible not to wonder whether Curtis knew the end was near.  “This is the crisis I knew had to come / Destroying the balance I’d kept,” he warns on the quietly morbid “Passover.”  And the brilliant gothic undertones of “Heart and Soul” are just a warm-up for the three-song requiem that closes the album.

The astonishing, incomparable “Twenty Four Hours”—the band’s all-time high point—finds Curtis at the end of the line: “Just for one moment, I thought I’d found my way / Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away,” he intones, before Hook and Morris take off the shackles for a ferociously intense breakthrough designed to knock you out.  The perfect comedown arrives in the presence of the gorgeous yet sepulchral piano that lives inside “The Eternal,” which describes a funeral procession, as though Curtis is watching himself being lowered into the ground.  Finally, “Decades” and its unsettling synths describe him stepping back to view the tragedy, after it’s all over: “Watched from the wings as the scenes were replaying / We saw ourselves now as we never had seen.”

Joy Division had already agreed to not continue on without one of its members, so Curtis’s suicide officially terminated the band.  Yet the remaining members quickly rebounded, adding a keyboardist and renaming themselves New Order.  They spent the next couple decades redefining dance rock, becoming a fixture in clubs and pop charts simultaneously with songs like “Temptation,” “Blue Monday,” the Curtis-penned “Ceremony,” and “Regret.”

Meanwhile, the next generation’s interest in Joy Division has been spurred on by a wave of compilations, reissues (including both albums), and films.  Ian’s wife Deborah wrote a memoir that became the basis for the stately 2007 film Control, a book that reveals fascinating insights about Ian’s thoughts, such as that as a teenager he frequently professed no desire to live past his early 20s.

All told, the band’s aura, mystique, and reputation have only grown in the past 29 years.  Their music lives on in the influence of countless bands, from U2 to The Cure to The Arcade Fire and Franz Ferdinand, and in confused teenagers hearing them for the first time.  Newcomers should eschew the 2008 hack-job “Best of Joy Division” CD and pick up both albums and Substance, which would be worth its cost just for the inclusion of the elegiac duo “Atmosphere” and “Love,” back to back on the disc, which have in a way have become the band’s most definitive songs.

John Peel, host of a famous UK radio show, played the former after announcing Curtis’s death, and Control ended with it as well.  The first time hearing those heavenly chimes added on top of Hook’s supplicating bass is one of those musical moments never forgotten.  And the endlessly covered “Love” has become almost a cliché in and of itself.  Its title was inscribed on Curtis’s tombstone, which is both depressing and appropriate, for it reflects Curtis’s morbid fatalism that probably contributed to his inability to keep living.  He sang on “Heart and Soul” that “I exist on the best terms I can,” and maybe that was true for a while.  But, through some combination of marital strife, unanticipated fame, fear, personal faults, and inadequate coping and defense mechanisms, he couldn’t continue—and although that mindset may be partially responsible for the truth of his music, that fact still haunts us.  By the time of swan song “Decades,” he had it understood, going and “knocking on the doors of Hell’s darker chambers,” the battle complete—and lost.