XIV. Bauhaus | In The Flat Field

BAUHAUS
In The Flat Field
©4AD. UK, 1980.

‟With Post-Punk taking a sudden turn for the delicate and baroque one starts wondering where the atonal freaky stuff has all gone? Where oh where can a boy turn when he wants to hear scratchy wailing nightmare music? Oh Ian McCulloch! Robert Smith! Siouxie Sioux! You're beautiful melodic textures are too much! Fear not though, because this is where Peter Murphy and his band of goths marches in to return representation to dark noisy post-punk, and with quite a band. In fact Bauhaus kind of takes that form of music to an almost cartoony extreme. Nor are they altogether experimental or anything. Actually...whole dramatic opening paragraph aside, I have to say this really does have more in common with the more accessible theatrical post-punk of 80'. It isn't so deep digging as the 79'ers. But man oh man does it use a wholly different pallet than say Echo. Also, what is with rockers named Peter?? Why are they so....dramatic? Peter Murphy is akin to Peter Gabriel (in his Genesis days) in just how much of a damn show he makes his goth music, this ain't no Siouxie mood thing, Murphy is always in some almost Vincent Price type performance style with what he does. But unlike Gabriel he doesn't really dominate the band, the guitar playing is the central component, courtesy of Daniel Ash. He really makes a work of art with those scratch guitars, whereas guys like Keith Levene took more supportive roles with their guitars, standing aside from the rest of the music and lashing out occasionally, Ash does nothing of the sort. He instead billows up storms and winds of the stuff, unavoidably front and center in the songs. There's also cool things like the distorted opera samples that drift through Stigmata Martyr. They even get kind of Gang of Four on us with dance-punk tracks like Dive. For such clear and obvious elements though they play toward those little things as the groups like the Bunnymen do. It's a strange dynamic actually, such bombastic music made for textures and these small things. The mood's not so subtle either though haha, it's a flamboyant gothic theater. Oh god nevermind, this is a confusing review for a simple album! It's a crazy goth album, simple enough. And a very good one, with wild and fun songs. It's not scary even (or very serious either next to stuff like Joy Division), but you can get a real thrill from the ....almost horror movie like roller coaster value of it.‟

Zephos