For some reason I thought Bauhaus were another synth-pop band, but they’re not, they’re solidly in the Siouxsie Sioux/Joy Division/Killing Joke goth end of things. Within this genre, however, the songs on this album are very varied.
So while Kevin Haskins on drums may tend towards the bass / low toms gated-reverb style popular at this time, and while Daniel Ash on guitar tends towards a wandering scratchy style somewhere between Jah Wobble and Robert Fripp, the band overall take this into new territory, often by adding some saxophone that recalls Bowie, or Andy McKay’s work with Roxy Music, or even Nik Turner from Hawkwind – sparse atonal decorations rather than smooth grooves, notably on the track In Fear Of Fear.
The similarity to Bowie doesn’t end there. Singer Peter Murphy sounds a little like Bowie at times, and the lyrics, touching on dark imagery such as “The passion of lovers is for death” (The Passion Of Lovers) have the same feel as Bowie’s cut-and-paste method. If you had a set of “fridge magnet poetry for goths” you could probably construct a Bauhaus song. It’s like the band have filled the niche left by Bowie while he’s publishing film soundtracks and compilation albums for the next few years (he’s not long released Scary Monsters And Super Freaks, which I am *very* surprised doesn’t make the cut, and it’ll be some years before he creates Tin Machine).
Bowie aside, there are some interesting deviations from the goth norm, notably the spoken-word track Of Lilies And Remains that features some great evocative imagery over a trancy beat such as “running through ghost closet locker rooms to hide from Peter who has fallen to the old cold stone floor wheezing and emitting a seemingly endless flow of ectoplasmic white goo from ears and mouth”. Kick In The Eye, meanwhile, goes quite funky on the bass (courtesy of bassist David J).
I liked this one a lot.
Comments
Post a Comment