In the waning weeks of my time up here in Boston, I was sitting around with Coner, my roommate, watching the Daily Show. One of the advertisements we saw was for Absolut Vodka, and it struck me in a funny way. There was something… familiar about it. Took me a bit to place it, but I finally recognized New Order’s ‘Ceremony’ noodling around in the background. I can’t tell if it’s a new recording or has just been mastered differently, but either way it was still good to hear such a classic track over a pretty well-crafted ad (or at least one with decent production value):

‘Ceremony‘ is a track I only just heard this summer. For all I owe them in shaping my current musical fancies, I have knowledge of an embarrassingly small amount of the Joy Division/New Order catalog. But earlier, I saw the track, and grabbed it off the net. Soon after, I found a Radiohead cover of the same song, and I like them both very much. The spot of trivia I also learned was that this was one of the last songs penned by Ian Curtis, and as such, it represents a strange bridge between the two groups.

Conceived by Curtis under the Joy Division moniker, it was not recorded until after his suicide, then by the reformed band under the name New Order. It was their first single, and though they would later top it with ‘Blue Monday’ (the best-selling single of all time, please note), it remains an important track in the chronology of both ‘groups’, and has the staying power to match.