Your JD: Shaken Live or Stirred Recorded?

As much as I love Hannett's unique production stylings on both the JD albums and the singles, I prefer the blaring thrash and pseudo-metal live recordings. Tracks like Interzone, These Days, and A Means to an End are almost complete reinventions of the albums versions.

The live stuff is interesting, but dare I say it; I prefer the recorded stuff better. They managed to cram a lot of atmosphere into their recordings; far better than most of the bland over-produced pop-music pap we are tortured with nowadays...

The live sound is how they wanted to be heard, it is the truest representation of what they envisaged when they wrote the songs. The recorded versions are Martin Hannett's interpretations of what he thought they wanted to sound like.

The recorded songs have a beauty to them, which the harshness, error prone, eractic-ness of the live shows fail to produce.

I'll go with the records-but where do the Peel sessions fit in? They're semi-live, and a track like 'Insight' is better than the album version.

Unknown Pleasures was a stunning debut. Closer was the masterpiece (and may still be the finest LP spanning both groups...although Technique in a very different way is a contender). I read somewhere that the band were much more involved with the production of Closer. That's probably why it sounds much better than Unknown Pleasures.

I wonder why Movement sounds like Hannett briefly regained excessive studio control...

JV wrote: I'll go with the records-but where do the Peel sessions fit in? They're semi-live, and a track like 'Insight' is better than the album version.

Unknown Pleasures was a stunning debut. Closer was the masterpiece (and may still be the finest LP spanning both groups...although Technique in a very different way is a contender). I read somewhere that the band were much more involved with the production of Closer. That's probably why it sounds much better than Unknown Pleasures.

I wonder why Movement sounds like Hannett briefly regained excessive studio control...

I guess the sessions would fall under records, as they were recorded properly and not exactly in front of an audience or in a venue. I'm not sure what to think of them, Insight is certainly one of JD's forgotten tracks, but I don't really like their recording of LWTUA. That being said, the No Wave-ish version of Transmission is puzzling more than anything else.

I don't know if i'd call Unknown Pleasures the better album, but for some reason it's always been the one that I had an easier time listening to from beginning to end. I think it's because UP was singularly focused in its sound and its intent, while Closer was a lot more like the Clash's Sandanista! or XTC's Apples & Oranges; where every track is an island of the Galapagos in a vast ocean with completely different evolutions on each. This could arguably be chalked up to a band not knowing in which direction to go in after a virtually-flawless debut, but looking at the similarly experimental PC&L we can see that the band weren't ones to be caught in sophomore slump.

Unknown Pleasures is simply depressing and grim like a twenty foot cement wall, while Closer is actually frightening, like a forboding alleyway with a flickering lightbulb flashing illumination on possibilities that are as much a product of your imagination as the band and Hannett's work.

I think i've figured it out: the sound of Unknown Pleasures was so stripped down and filled with space that it made every instrument sound like the Second Coming (Jeebus, not the Stone Roses). Barney's simple, single string slide riffs on the refrains of Disorder and Shadowplay are elevated to level of the most important thing in the world.

I'll go for both.

Each setting brought something new to it.

Each is a very different animal. Forming as a punk band, the raw sound of the live setting could have been more pleasurable for the band, but Hannett's production is often superb--though he does overproduce several of the tracks into crap. Case in point: Autosuggestion....great song live, absolute shit in the studio.

I don't think I understood Joy Division until I heard the live albums. I never cared much for the production on the proper albums and I still can't listen to the album versions of certain songs. Disorder comes to mind. It's a strong song yet the version on Unknown Pleasures does nothing for me.

Live = real

Reset wrote: I don't think I understood Joy Division until I heard the live albums. I never cared much for the production on the proper albums and I still can't listen to the album versions of certain songs. Disorder comes to mind. It's a strong song yet the version on Unknown Pleasures does nothing for me.

I second that.

I always go for the recordings, I feel like they have a more polished sound to them that the live stuff lacks. (not that I don't like the live stuff- I just prefer the studio tracks)

Some tracks sound much better live (She's Lost Control, Dead Souls), some better on record (Atmosphere), and some sound the dog's bollocks on both (LWTUA, 24 Hours)

I absolutely love the recordings, but live is where it's at. The raw power and energy in their performances is just astounding. I can only imagine what it must have been like to see them.