Editor’s Picks: Post-Punk Pleasures
Just over thirty years ago this week, Manchester’s legendary Joy Division played their first-ever live show; this past week the band was also at the center of the Internet’s biggest meme, thanks to Disney, who used the cover image from the post-punk band’s 1979 debut (below) and kinked it with the Mickey Mouse logo. Disney has since pulled the shirt from the market, but the sense of irony was apparently not lost on post-punkers everywhere, who know Joy Division were finished after two records, upon lead singer Ian Curtis’s grisly suicide, with the other members returning as New Order. Memes aside, the band’s position and influence among bands both popular and independent, and the last decade of retro bands, shouldn’t be understated.
Leading with Joy Division’s debut Unknown Pleasures, MOG Editorial salutes post-punk classics both past and present in this week’s Editor’s Picks. Radical Leeds punk-funkers Gang of Four dropped a sound on Entertainment! that’s often been nicked but never quite replicated, with tight interplay between members and monstrous beats and guitar stabs that really stick you. After The Sex Pistols, lead singer John Lydon (formerly Rotten) joined with bassist Jah Wobble and guitarist Keith Levene from The Clash to fuse their punk energy with outside influences like dub-reggae and German space-rock, and their second album Second Edition comes on bleak and groovy at once. Post-punk goddesses The Slits took a similar dub-heavy approach to punk on their debut Cut, weaving their rhythms with pumping bass lines, shrill guitar, and pure, naive harmonies. And indie darlings to this day Mission Of Burma continue the ingenius guitar playing and high-energy rock they demonstrated on their first full-length, Vs.
Current bands like Interpol later took more than a few pointers from those bands, and others like Echo & The Bunnymen and Josef K, to form their own form of neo-post-punk, as is found on Turn On The Bright Lights. And the style’s traditions can still be heard within newer, artsier bands like These New Puritans, whose Hidden is among the better records of recent years.
Our editors’ playlist includes tracks from each pick, so take listen!
* Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures
* Gang of Four – Entertainment!
* Public Image Ltd. – Second Edition
* Magazine – Real Life
* Echo & The Bunnymen – Ocean Rain
* Josef K – Entomology
* The Slits – Cut
* Mission of Burma – Vs.
* These New Puritans – Hidden
* Interpol – Turn On The Bright Lights
