takes me back...
This was a great find - it takes me back to those angst filled teenage years. As a major Joy Division fan, I was thrilled to get this CD and get a feel for their evolution as a band. Get New Order - 316 if you want to hear an early New Order still sounding like Joy Division.

the joy division demos
I have always been a huge fan of all Joy Division derivitives, including New Order, Monaco, and Revenge. This album is the boys from Joy Division before the name change. If you thought JD was raw and stark, try this one on for size. They polished a few of the songs off for later re-release, but this great album captures the pure essence of the band, with Ian is all his glory.

I agree with Daniel - Joy Division at their rawest and best
Joy Division was a rock band. That comes through on this album. The sound is raw as is the recording but for me it's the best one, the least compromised one the most rebellious one. Great band never to return. One of those inexplicable "clicked".

Buy it, Love it, Be it
I owned this album for two decades as a bootleg tape that got passed around the Berkeley punk scene in the early eighties, and it never failed to become the favorite music of anyone I turned on to it. Joy Division always seems to sound better (to me) at their rawest, and the lower sound quality adds an edge of doom not found on the sanctioned version (of course this could just be that it reminds me of scratchy records). Either way, if you're a fan of "Closer" or New Order, I'm pretty sure you won't dig this. If you were immediately hypnotized by "Unknown Pleasures" like I was at fifteen, this is essential.

5 stars for JD fans; this stuff ROCKS!
This is great for many reasons:

1) It's a good chance to hear the band as it just started to shed its early punk sound and become much darker-sounding. Its also a chance to hear them without any fancy Martin Hannett production trickery.

2) It's a remarkable document of just how much Ian's voice changed in a very short time. This is a snarling, snotty sounding, angry young man at the mic - nothing to even hint that in two years he'd be crooning like a despondent Frank Sinatra on songs like "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Heart And Soul". Listen to "Walked in Line" on this album and compare it to the version from "Still." Its hard to believe they were only done a year apart.

3) It's got a couple of what i feel are the best versions of Joy Division songs: "Shadowplay," "No Love Lost," "Leaders of Men," and "Novelty" all sound better here, even in their somewhat rough recordings, than any other version I know of.

4) Only 3 of the 11 songs here are included on the box set.

5) For sheer comic value, you have to love the last five songs - these are the earliest, rawest recordings of Joy Division. Sometimes I just crack up listening to these incredibly primitive cuts - "You're No Good For Me" could have been done by any number of booze-soaked louts. But even as early as July '77 Ian's lyrics were already chilling: "Human beings are dangerous and they call me in the dark" (At A Later Date), for example. Plus you get the immortal "Warsaww!!!" howl at the beginning of "Gutz."

This is a very good "punk" album and a very interesting Joy Division album. Highly recommended.