Newly Night People, Part 4 - Blessure Grave - "Unknown Blessure"

Holy shit, Joy Division are back, yet more low-pitched male singing, some ringing guitars. Singing about jail, that sounds pretty heavy. But my initial stab at disdain is ebbing away, there’s something really otherwordly about these guys. It’s not hard to imagine this as the demo reel for a group contemporary with Joy Division who didn’t make it because they were too uncompromisingly bleak.

I know that a great deal of the Night People essence is in a certain rawness held in common by many of the label’s artists. And there’s something about Blessure Grave that is appropriate, they’re still loose and they cover for it with their intensity. But perhaps a hidden pleasure of the record is in wondering what it would sound like if they pushed past the demo-on-a-tape phase and polished and honed. Would it be better than this loose but compelling set of songs about being trapped and buried alive?

Then again, who needs this kind of nihilism to be more effectively executed? Some people have real problems.

Bottom line: Intensely depressing or depressingly intense, I can’t quite tell.

We find ourselves constantly being brought back to that text by the paradoxes of the double and of repetition, the blurring of the boundary lines between ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’, between the ‘symbol’ and the ‘thing it symbolizes’.

-Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’