It takes guts to cover Joy Division, even when the great band itself never got around to officially recording the track in question. And you’d better hope that you’ve really
got your mojo rising when the song in question has since been seemingly definitively laid down by the almost equally great outfit to have arisen from the ashes of Curtis’ death, New Order. But that’s exactly what Galaxie 500, iconoclasts to the core, set out to do with “Ceremony”, and they rise magnificently to the challenge, producing a version which manages to be completely true to both the original and to their own, distinctive sound. Ethereal, sad, beautiful and somehow foreboding, it is as if the late eighties daze-rockers were somehow channeling Joy Division while speaking in a voice which was unmistakeably their own. - 30/9/02Feels the whole time as if it’s on the verge of shaking itself apart, trembling and shuddering, while simultaneously building ineluctably from its first chords to the unending crescendo in which Wareham stretches and intones and cries, gasping for breath through the suffocation and distance of it all, “forever…forever…” as the guitars crash on and on and on and on…
