Joy Division - Heart and Soul

The package is handsome beyond belief, a long box that presents itself like a landscape designed in typical Factory Records fashion by Peter Saville, Jon Wozencroft, and Howard Wakefield. There are plenty of gorgeous photographs and plenty to read, not only by Morely and John Savage but also reflections by the remaining bandmembers themselves. The lyrics are all here, courtesy of Deborah Curtis, Ian's widow. But package and legend aside, it's the music that is most mysterious. Nearly 20 years after the band's dissolution, it still sounds so forward, so out of time and place as to be not only current but also perhaps even timeless. In four minutes of any Joy Division song, one could enter worlds of pain, loss, rage, and rebirth (or, alternately, travel those worlds in the reverse order). Influenced by the Velvet Underground and punk rock, Joy Division went far beyond those entities in search of something that was unobtainable in rock roll. Rock was only the place where these artists looked together to make the world of appearances disappear. This disappearance happened somewhere inside the music, in a split between rhythm and lyric, where guitars and drums forced each other to take comfort in something that was too large, open, and unwieldy to be contained within a song. Joy Division took on the pop world and did everything wrong, but it did so only to take the music one step further out of the pop context and one step deeper into the world of human beings. The band was hidden, never flashy, issuing singles that never appeared on albums and playing manic sets that never quite ended. Joy Division took upon itself the kind of discovery that pop music is never supposed to acquaint itself with. Joy Division, as these recordings bear witness to, is still out there on some wasted frontier looking for something uncontained or possessed by lyrical considerations, notes churning in the void, or a murky, echoplexed mix. Its music falls apart endlessly as it takes listeners through the moments in their own lives that require a soundtrack. The records in this set are not for reflection or merely documentation; they still point a way toward what might be, not only in the future of pop but in the darkened hallways of the human heart. The music heeds Ian Curtis' own dictum from the song "Atmosphere": "Don't walk away in silence." As a pop band, Joy Division failed, because its music hasn't become disposable or dismissible. It has become art by virtue not only of its influence and longevity, but by its willingness to shroud itself in mystery, challenging not just rock roll and its now predictable stasis of convention, but the nature of aesthetic life (i.e., art) itself. As a result, this collection is among the most essential relics from the post-punk era.

- Thom Jurek, All Music Guide