Joy Division’s Massive ‘Eternal’ Boxed Set Documents the Band’s Brilliant Evolution Over 16 Concerts: Album Review

Few artists have cast as vast an influence in as short a time as Joy Division, the pioneering Manchester post-punk quartet whose dark, haunting songs and sound helped shape many genres and scenes that were to follow, from the obvious — indie-rock, goth, industrial — to the less-obvious, like electronic dance music.

Yet the fact that the group is being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this fall — along with New Order, the band Joy Division became after singer Ian Curtis’ suicide in May of 1980 — is as ironic as the fact that the group is more widely known for T-shirts bearing the cover of its first album, “Unknown Pleasures,” than its music. Joy Division were considered post-rock or even anti-rock at the time, and they vehemently spurned cliches — at the end of the group’s live cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” Curtis says with withering disdain, “You should hear our version of ‘Louie Louie’ — woah.” While the punk rock scene that spawned them was about overthrowing the bloated rock royalty of the ‘60s and mid-‘70s, punk was still showy and flamboyant; Joy Division were nothing of the sort. They wore dark, businesslike clothes, had a dark demeanor, a dark sound and even darker lyrics.

“This is a crisis I knew had to come/ Destroying the balance I’d kept
Doubting, unsettling and turning around/ Wondering what will come next

Is this the role that you wanted to live? / I was foolish to ask for so much
Without the protection and infancy’s guard/ It all falls apart at first touch”

The sound of Joy Division’s two studio albums, “Unknown Pleasures” and “Closer,” was just as influential as the songs themselves: The band’s brilliant but troubled producer, Martin Hannett, was far more interested in making guitars sound like machinery or a swarm of hornets than, say, a vintage Telecaster. The albums sound otherworldly, with strange sound effects, breaking glass and distant industrial noises embellishing the songs; Curtis’ vocal on the grim passage quoted above is double-tracked, but the second is him literally whispering along with himself, making the verses even more unsettling. Joy Division had no shortage of influences — the Velvets, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Kraftwerk — but their albums sound like nothing that had come before.

Thus, it’s surprising to realize when first hearing Joy Division concert recordings what a bruising, in-your-face rock band they were — the obscurity in their sound is gone and it’s Bernard Sumner’s snarling guitars, Peter Hook’s bruising bass and Stephen Morris’ thundering drums, with Curtis’ roaring vocals distorting and overwhelming the sound system during the exceptionally loud parts. And you hear a lot of that on “Eternal,” the massive new boxed set, which sprawls across 14 CDs and two DVDs, culled from a total of 18 performances (a couple of which are soundchecks) from across the band’s 14-month peak. Several of the recordings suffer from rough sound quality, despite the best efforts of the set’s producers, with just a few offering what the average fan would expect from a live album — but then again, anyone who’s going this far in is probably well accustomed to such imperfections.

Several of the shows have been previously released, and nearly all have been available as bootlegs for decades, since they date from the era when virtually every concert in England had at least one person in the audience with a portable cassette recorder who would then sell bootleg tapes in open-air markets “at the week-end” or swap them with other collectors. Most of these recordings come from such methods, although there are a few soundboard cassettes as well as more-professional source recordings. (The concerts from Amsterdam, Birmingham and the Factory in Manchester are the best here in terms of both quality and performance, although there are flaws with each; the DVDs include long-available BBC performances, along with obsessives-only concert and soundcheck videos.)

And while a 16-disc collection of Joy Division’s music seems like it could be a mental-health hazard, the fact that these are (mostly) energetic concert recordings makes them less grim than a lot of the studio work — as does the band’s ever-changing setlists, drawing from an unusually large repertoire of original songs for such a young band. They’d be just as likely to open with an obscure instrumental as “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (which was not released until after Curtis’ death) or the dirge-like “I Remember Nothing.” And while they would generally stick to an arrangement once they’d nailed it, there are some surprises here, like a surprisingly uplifting early version of “The Eternal” with music quite different from the final take, and a stumbling version of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” where Curtis attempts to play rhythm guitar (Sumner is on keyboards) and apparently realizes that he can’t do it and sing at the same time — he even says at the end, “As you can tell, we haven’t rehearsed in a while” and then laughs.

But most of all, it’s fascinating hearing the band’s incredible creative burst evolve over the course of just 14 months (the concerts are presented chronologically), across good nights and bad nights, introducing increasingly stunning new songs, creating some of the most beautifully haunting music of their generation … until one of them couldn’t take it anymore. They were so young — the eldest members of the band at the time of Curtis’ death were just 24 — that the sophistication and darkness of the music and especially the lyrics is hard to comprehend. Even their prettiest songs — “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “Atmosphere” — are steeped in despair; “Means to an End” has a monstrous groove but it’s so menacing that you kind of want to dance to it, but somehow feel you shouldn’t.

There’s little question that the most intense set among many in this collection is the band’s final concert, in Birmingham on May 2, 1980, which was initially released on the first posthumous compilation, “Still.” According to reports from audience members, he was in ill health and barely made it through the show, but his performance is harrowing: We hear a 23-year-old man who was two weeks away from taking his own life sing passionately on “New Dream Fades”: “The strain’s too much, can’t take much more/ I’ve walked on water, run through fire/ Can’t seem to feel it anymore.”

As with all such art, it’s impossible to tell whether some of these impressions actually emanate from the work or the ensuing myth, and the knowledge of what was just around the corner. As Simon Armitage writes in the liner notes, if Curtis’s death reinforced Joy Division’s image as funereal and morbid, it also “fixed their legacy in amber,” for better and worse. Small wonder that the pristine and pioneering electronic pop music the three surviving members of Joy Division made as New Order over the following decades featured lyrics and vocals that verged on triteness; they’d seen the other side and presumably had no desire to go there again.

“Eternal” is clearly aimed at obsessive fans, but it documents the evolution of Joy Division’s brilliance in real time, and includes some of the most beautiful and challenging music of their time.