The Birthday Party - The Birthday Party/Hee Haw
#476
By Jim Erbe
November 1980
The Birthday Party/The Boys Next Door
The Birthday Party/Hee Haw
Genre: No Wave
Allen’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Jim’s Rating: 3 out of 5
Highlights:
Mr. Clarinet
Waving My Arms
Requisite 80’s Cover:
Cat Man – Originally a straightforward 50’s rockabilly song about a local lothario by Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, this version comes loaded with palpable menace and the very real sense that the Cat Man is either a serial killer or a horrifying, hulking hybrid of man and cat. Probably both.
There’s a lot that’s confusing about this disc.
In 1980, this band changed its name from The Boys Next Door to The Birthday Party. Depending on who you believe, that was either a nod to Harold Pinter’s play of the same name; a reference to a non-existent birthday party scene in Crime and Punishment; or because Nick Cave and Rowland S. Howard wanted to give the band a sense of celebration, occasion and ritual.
For whatever the reason, in 1982 the band’s 1980 output was rebranded under the new name and so The Boy’s Next Door’s The Birthday Party and their EP Hee Haw were combined simply as The Birthday Party. That’s the record we have here. Full disclosure, I did not parse the album out to separate the two originals.
On top of that, nobody can agree on what genre these guys travel in. Now, I am not big fan of genres in general. I find them to be an outdated construct that was useful in the record store days, but are increasingly meaningless in a world where music recommendations are driven mainly by algorithm. To prove my point, various sources list these guys as Alternative, Punk Rock, New Wave, Post-Punk, Avant-Garde, Experimental Rock, Garage Rock, Gothic Rock and Noise Music (that last one seems like they’re not even trying) and there is absolutely zero consensus.
I’m listing here them as No Wave partially because I find them reminiscent of bands like Swans, The Lounge Lizards, early Devo and early B-52’s, but mostly because I was skeptical Allen would accept a genre of “Fuck If I Know”.
Despite all of this confusion, a few things are unquestionable about this record. The band—Cave, Howard, Mick Harvey, Tracy Pew and Phillip Calvert—know what they’re doing. These songs are well crafted, genuinely unsettling and, once you get past the tinny guitars and angular percussion, catchy. They do have a tendency to bleed one into another, but when they pop, they really pop.
“Mr. Clarinet”, the album opener and a song about unrequited love that seems destined to go imminently and violently wrong, is a good litmus test for the album as a whole. If the atonal singing, chunky rhythms and gothic tone do not work for you, the rest of this album is going to be tough sledding.
My favorite track, “Waving My Arms”, is the closest these guys come to poppy and radio-friendly even though I’m pretty sure it’s a song about a guy who’s drowning and preparing himself to sleep for 50,000 years.
As a whole, I find this record uncomfortable. Listening to it, I feel like I’m in the sub-basement of an ancient building, next to a boiler with a busted pressure valve. The music feels oppressive, hot, sweaty and like the entire affair could explode violently at any moment.
That being said, after listening to this record a few times, I find myself humming Mr. Clarinet several times a day.
I can’t say I’m pleased about that.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1X8SOjl2G6uUNfKSmlgwn0?si=TwEQtLyiSLSST_eL5aiAyQ
No comments:
Post a Comment