Pick four songs from any band and you can tell a lot about their sound. This summer, I’m featuring #RockBlocks, four picks from bands across various genres. They might be wildly different from each other, but what binds them together is the fact that they’re all a part of my life soundtrack.
The album title Unknown Pleasures is an appropriate one. The record is full of sounds and explorations never heard before. Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Hooky and Stephen Morris all did things on it that were truly inventive and inspirational for bands and instrumentalists, even still today. One of the more well known tracks, “She’s Lost Control”, was infectious, but far from accessible — and that’s what I love most about it.
There’s something strangely addictive about the song. It starts with an unusual drum part from Stephen Morris, which feels deliberately industrial. In the film biopic Control, Morris is seen spraying an aerosol can into the mic to manufacture the signature sound. Then things get even weirder with Hooky’s mesmerizing bass line played way up high on the neck. The oddness continues as Curtis stumbles in singing about a woman who suffers from epileptic seizures — and it seems he’s having one himself as he sings it. This leaves us with Bernard Sumner who’s busy carving out a grating riff that’s lower than Hooky’s bass line. It’s a strange composition that I can’t seem to stop listening to once I start.
“And she gave away the secrets of her past and said ‘I've lost control again.’”