Limited-Edition 3xCD Joy Division Box Set Due This Month
"And this chair. And this paddle-ball game. And this Joy Division box set, and that's all I need."

[Posted Wednesday, November 12th, 2003 04:00:00 Pitchfork Central Time]

Hey there, kiddies! Disgruntled Santa in the house, keeping it real on the wizzle-wagon, and all of that garbage. I've got a question for all of ya'll, and don't sweat the answer too much-- it's not the kind of question that you can get wrong. How many of you lovable tykes enjoy the seminal stylings of Joy Division? Don't even think about raising your hand, Billy, that was clearly a rhetorical question. Of course you like Joy Division! Their gloomy, tightly-woven, and freakishly danceable sound paved the way for all those shithead revivalists you eat up with a spoon, and they're widely regarded as one of the greatest bands of all time. But unfortunately for all you budding infant goths, singer Ian Curtis went to post-punk heaven way back in the May of 1980, after leaping in front of a kryptonite missile to save Superman's life.

At the time of the band's unseasonable demise, they had a pretty damn respectable collection of recorded material-- keeping in mind, of course, the sucker's motto of "quality over quantity." Someone up at the top of the food chain (I'm not gonna lie to you guys, it was the selfsame God that made your parents care so tragically little for your general well-being) decided that the band's discography wasn't quite bulbous enough for his liking, a minor grievance which was promptly amended by a little something us grownups refer to as "the posthumous release."

So to nurture the collectors with another round of scrumptious rarities and to extract a meaty wad of neon-green cash money from an artist's bloated corpse, Factory Records is releasing a Joy Division live box set on November 24th. Not only does it contain three whole shows of Joy Division at their indisputably all-time most live, but it also comes jam-packed with an extra-large t-shirt and a facsimile of a 1979 tour poster!

But of course, there's got to be some cruel and unusual twist specifically designed to make you simps bawl your beady little eyes out, and it's this: two of the three shows in this set (namely Preston and Les Bains Douche) have already been commercially released, and the so-called exclusive third concert (a show at the Paradiso in Amsterdam from January 1980) has been widely distributed for so long now that the first person to burn a CD-R of the bootleg invented the wheel eleven months later.

And while I'm sure the die-hard collectors out there (take that copy of Permanent out of your mouth, Billy, you're making Santa love you even less) would adore an official release of the Amsterdam concert, said collectors wouldn't be very good at their job if they didn't already own copies of the other two shows included in this set.

All t-shirts aside (and it's still unconfirmed whether the shirt is even a new design), this limited-edition box set extravaganza (only 3000 minted on planet Earth) fails to deliver anything new. Whether or not it's worth your coin is a purely subjective decision, which I'd wager has a lot to do with whether you already own these live performances, but one thing is made crystal clear by the law of the posthumous release: money talks, bullshit walks. And you little bastards are getting salads for Christmas! Never forget! Tracklist:

Les Bains Douche [live December 18th, 1979]:

01 Disorder
02 Love Will Tear Us Apart
03 Insight
04 Shadowplay
05 Transmission
06 Day Of the Lords
07 Twenty-Four Hours
08 These Days
09 A Means to an End
10 Passover
11 New Dawn Fades
12 Atrocity Exhibition
13 Digital
14 Dead Souls
15 Auto-suggestion
16 Atmosphere

Paradiso Club [live January 11th, 1980]:

01 Passover
02 Wilderness
03 Digital
04 Day of the Lords
05 Insight
06 New Dawn Fades
07 Disorder
08 Transmission
09 Love Will Tear Us Apart
10 These Days
11 A Means to an End
12 Twenty-Four Hours
13 Shadowplay
14 She's Lost Control
15 Atrocity Exhibition

Preston Warehouse [live February 28th, 1980]:

01 Incubation
02 Wilderness
03 Twenty-Four Hours
04 The Eternal
05 Heart and Soul
06 Shadowplay
07 Transmission
08 Disorder
09 Warsaw
10 Colony
11 Interzone
12 She's Lost Control

Factory: http://www.factoryrecords.com