Joy Division- Unknown Pleasures 2xCD

2007 digitally remastered and expanded two CD edition of the influential Manchester quartet's 1979 debut album. Joy Division's influence on modern music is not only based around the band's unique sound, but also their vision, their personalities and their intense and troubled vocalist, Ian Curtis who committed suicide on the eve of their first tour of the U.S. Disc One features the original album containing 10 tracks including 'Disorder', 'She's Lost Control' and 'Interzone'. Disc Two features 12 tracks recorded live at the Factory in Manchester, April of 1980. Rhino UK.

• 1 Exercise One (Disc 01)
• 2 Ice Age
• 3 The Sound of Music
• 4 Glass
• 5 The Only Mistake
• 6 Walked in Line
• 7 The Kill
• 8 Something Must Break
• 9 Dead Souls
• 10 Sister Ray
• 11 Ceremony
• 12 Shadowplay
• 13 A Means to An End
• 14 Passover
• 15 New Dawn Fades
• 16 Transmission
• 17 Disorder
• 18 Isolation
• 19 Decades
• 20 Digital
• 21 The Sound of Music (Disc 02)
• 22 A Means to An End
• 23 Colony
• 24 Twenty Four Hours
• 25 Isolation
• 26 Love Will Tear Us Apart
• 27 Disorder
• 28 Atrocity Exhibition
• 29 Isolation
• 30 The Eternal
• 31 Ice Age
• 32 Disorder
• 33 The Sound of Music
• 34 A Means to An End

It even looks like something classic, beyond its time or place of origin even as it was a clear product of both -- one of Peter Saville's earliest and best designs, a transcription of a signal showing a star going nova, on a black embossed sleeve. If that were all Unknown Pleasures was, it wouldn't be discussed so much, but the ten songs inside, quite simply, are stone-cold landmarks, the whole album a monument to passion, energy, and cathartic despair. The quantum leap from the earliest thrashy singles to Unknown Pleasures can be heard through every note, with Martin Hannett's deservedly famous production -- emphasizing space in the most revelatory way since the dawn of dub -- as much a hallmark as the music itself. Songs fade in behind furtive noises of motion and activity, glass breaks with the force and clarity of doom, minimal keyboard lines add to an air of looming disaster -- something, somehow, seems to wait or lurk beyond the edge of hearing. But even though this is Hannett's album as much as anyone's, the songs and performances are the true key. Bernard Sumner redefined heavy metal sludge as chilling feedback fear and explosive energy, Peter Hook's instantly recognizable bass work at once warm and forbidding, Stephen Morris' drumming smacking through the speakers above all else. Ian Curtis synthesizes and purifies every last impulse, his voice shot through with the desire first and foremost to connect, only connect -- as "Candidate" plaintively states, "I tried to get to you/You treat me like this." Pick any song: the nervous death dance of "She's Lost Control"; the harrowing call for release "New Dawn Fades," all four members in perfect sync; the romance in hell of "Shadowplay"; "Insight" and its nervous drive toward some sort of apocalypse. All visceral, all emotional, all theatrical, all perfect -- one of the best albums ever.