Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

(Factory, 1979)

When you hear Unknown Pleasures, there is nothing else.

This is Joy Division, a sound beyond mere music; glass black depth spiritual sculptures, heart scream seminal bravery, ephemeral, ominous, precise and relentless, cavernous yet claustrophobic, unsettling yet tender, simultaneously dark core alien and devastatingly human, their power so eminently transcending the simplicity of guitar bass drums voice.

"I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand..." booms the manic straitjacket wisdom and fury of one misunderstood, railing against a backdrop of glaze guitar splinter melodies, incessant cyclical lithe bass organism and sparse drum machinations, emotion ghost souls rattling their windsweep desperate howl through the empty remains of a thousand forgotten shell buildings.

"There's no room for the weak..." the mantra writhes, amongst the chaos and the echoes, the violence and the catharsis, disintegrating edges of controlled intoxication, shattered for ascension, a shivered recognition, an escape from within.

"I saw all knowledge destroyed..." dares the fluctuating trace, another engraved monument on the collapsed nightfall skyline, each as vital, direct and heady as the last cracked sombre breath of a slighted saviour.

"Until the spirit new sensation takes hold, then you know..."

To exist here is not so much storm force approaching. Just atmosphere.

Rating: (10)

My Bloody Valentine - Loveless

(Creation, 1991)

In blatant disregard of its chosen birth name, My Bloody Valentine's second full album release, Loveless, is of course anything but.

This record is, in its entirety, pure love soaked and intoxicant to the core; electric organic sonar hymns from rare touched ethereal hearts lull and weep their liquid sleep embryonic haze, bludgeoning swathes of dense hypnotic guitar omnipotence and transcendence writhe and rage their sublime warp dazed melodies, their combined swell tracing a continuous and relentless ascension to the surface of a full blood ocean and beyond, a brave Atlantis resurrection into the tranquil, cruel and frigid night, a belief only you, me and the stars could understand.

Occasionally, from somewhere inside these twisting amorphous depths, a shy lone truth bravely whispers its fragmented child memories, at once enraptured and lost, desperate and heady, longing for escape but delirious of its existing state. The overall impact and affect is so vast and overwhelming, it is both ecstatic blissful noise and soothing tender calm, a return to an unconscious past and future dreams incarnate, a rare exotic sonic creature, the sound of human love. Narcotic, scintillating and utterly essential, forcibly inhale and absorb this record while you still can - you may never feel its kind again.

Rating: (10)

And then, there was music...

At first the warmth and tremor of a solitary pure quivering note amidst the backdrop vapid blanket death silence. Then, soon after, another, lonely, tentative and cautious but curious of its fellow glow child in the nothing void. In synchronicity they focus on their spirit twin, twinkling in each other's distance, overwhelmingly drawn and thrown before suddenly, with a violent explosion of europhic contact, they embrace and kiss and dance and thirst and inhale and consume, then scatter the glittering virgin harvest of their union out across the desperate absence darkness, a vivid cry and vital call for any listening to unite and glide travel with them in sonic brave adventure. And lo the plea was answered with magnificent abundance and the silence of the void came alive in vibration with new breathe and texture and light and truth and heart and hope and then, there was music...