'Dance, dance. dance to the radio...' along with Californians Cruel Reflections. They're far from the first band to worship at the shrine of Unknown Pleasures. An interesting article might be written about those who have and why exactly they have then chosen to model their careers so specifically on this one record. Sounding like Joy Division is not exactly something you can disguise or divert in wildly diverse directions so telling and finite is the template they laid down. Particularly if your lead singer goes out of his way to give his very best Ian Curtis impression as singer Julio Cesar Francisco Garcia-Solares does here. But nobody else can be Joy Division or have their momentous impact on music again because they did what they did as well as it can possibly be done. That moment in time has gone.
And here we are forty years later and the influence of that band has spread exponentially to become something immeasurable and vast in popular culture. When bands are making Joy Division moves we know immediately that they are making Joy Division moves. And Cruel Reflections, over the course of their recently released debut album One Year never do anything but 'make Joy Division moves'. To all intents and purposes they are a Joy Division tribute band who play their own songs rather than just doing cover versions of Digital, Atmosphere and Isolation.
Where Cruel Reflections differ from Interpol and Editors, (bands who have taken this route before), is that Cruel Reflections are only surface intense. They make the moves but you don't get the sense that they feel the emotions. They seem to want to appeal to nightclubbing suburbanites and channel Joy Division's dark melodicism to urge them onto the dancefloor but only to dance as Andy McCluskey used to at the front of the stage for OMD rather than Curtis's flailing and utterly felt dying fly exorcism.
It reminds me of a visit to New York more than twenty years ago when a friend and I paid a visit to a New York club called English Disco which was just that and we were surprised to hear a Joy Division record followed by a Duran Duran one. This would never happen in the UK. Perhaps Americans could appreciate the tunes without being affected by the sheer cultural heaviness of songs like Transmission. Cruel Reflections almost make light of the angst, 'I'm fucking dying, I'm fucking dying, I'm fucking dying, I'm fucking dead...' Goes second song DED, and it's all dead catchy!
It's hard to work out exactly how serious Cruel Reflections are with their lyrical concerns which feature brooding teenage self-absorption about unattainable girls called Cynthia who you once wrote a novel about. It seems almost like pastiche, with all the while those priceless Joy Division musical tropes throbbing around them. You have to admit, the songs are damn good, even though strictly speaking they're all Joy Division songs except for the one that decides it wants to be The Cure's A Forest instead.
So One Year imagines an alternative reality where Curtis decided not to end it all, went to the States as he'd been due to with the rest of the band, cheered up, and was taken to the bosom of adoring crowds who loved their cool austere package. Where they sold out, lost their credibility but became bigger there than The Psychedelic Furs, Depeche Mode or the Cure could ever dream of being and Curtis moved to California rather than going back to Macclesfield. It's an extremely strange object which says something about the decidedly odd world we're living in here in 2018. In some ways it's a rather silly record but you've got to hand it to Cruel Reflections. The tunes are great!
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