Birthday Party - Live 1981-82
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Birthday PartyEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Live
CD Release Date: 1999-11-16
Music Label: 4ad / Ada
Soundtracks:
- Junkyard
- A Dead Song
- The Dim Locator
- Zoo-Music-Girl
- Nick The Stripper
- Blast Off!
- Release The Bats
- Bully Bones
- King Ink
- (Sometimes) Pleasure Heads Must Burn
- Big-Jesus-Trash-Can
- Dead Joe
- The Friend Catcher
- 6 Inch Gold Blade
- Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow)
- She's Hit
- Funhouse
Free Music Notes for Live 1981-82
Free Music Review: It's still living...
Hit: 5 Stars
Someone once said that you could tell the smart people at a Birthday Party concert, because they were the ones standing at the back. There were two advantages to being toward the back of the crowd at a BP performance - for one, you were less likely to sacrifice an eardrum to the squealing amps being pumped full of Rowland S. Howard's unique style of guitar playing. The other, more obvious advantage was that you were far less likely to get kicked in the face or hit on the head by Nick Cave.
The Birthday Party represent a style of music much missed in today's society. I'm not speaking so much of their genre, which is still present in this day and age (but is nowhere near as good), but rather the fact that their music was largely written for stage before studio, rather than the other way around. I bought "Hits" as my first taste of the BP a few months ago, and was impressed. The songs were intense. But then I got this, and realised that the studio recordings, despite Tony Cohen's best efforts, paled next to the work the BP did on stage.
The entire album is recorded in the wake of "Junkyard", and the classic hit (much to Nick Cave's endless puzzlement and frustration) "Release the Bats". It contains material ranging from 1979's "Hee-Haw" through to "Junkyard", including a few tracks which never made it to the studio. The quality varies - the London material is brilliant, but the Bremen concert has been quite noticably sourced from cassette. The Athens track is the worst quality, and I'm pretty sure it and the Bremen material are bootlegs which the band have bought. None of it's unlistenable, however, provided that you have a taste for the Birthday Party's style of music.
The Birthday Party, it must be said, never quite got the idea of rhythm. Oh sure, there are a lot of drums, but that doesn't mean that they keep the time or anything. Tracey Pew (bass) is the only member of the group who could or would keep the beat. Mick Harvey and Rowland S. Howard (guitars) just kind of seem to play thunderous riffs at will and Phil Calvert is in blistering form on his drums, but he plays them more as a lead than the rhythm section.
And as for Nick Cave...well - it seems a bit like he's decided how he's going to sing the lyrics, and no-one better try stop him. Doesn't matter to him that the music and lyrics are completely out of time. But that's what the BP so great. Take "A Dead Song" for example. It's heavy, thunderous, and nightmarish...in both lyrics and music. But neither really seem to influence the other. It's...well, wierd. Better descriptions escape me.
Not all the songs are like that, of course. "The Dim Locator" was a pleasant surprise, with Cave and the musicians almost seeming to have come to an agreement on how to perform together. The band even manage to sound almost rhythmic, with the primal drum and bass lines of tracks like "Zoo-Music-Girl" (one of the truly oddest songs about love ever written) and "Release the Bats".
"King Ink" was a song that I never really appreciated on the studio record, but here I've discovered a new fondness for it. "Pleasure Heads" is a track that is worth the purchase of this CD alone, with the BP in rare form with this stage only track.
For me, though, the highlight is the stunning rendition of "The Friend Catcher" from the Bremen concert. This track, one of the group's first, spanning back to their days as the Boys Next Door, is given a new dimension on stage that it was sorely lacking on record. It's truly stunning. It's so easy to picture Cave flinging his head back and forth as he screams "Hee-haw-hee-haw" and Mick Harvey and Rowland S. Howard on either side of him nailing a dual-guitar riff throughout the whole song. This CD - this song in particular - brings the experience of a Birthday Party concert to life.
If I had to make one complaint about this album, then it would have to be that it's too early in the band's career. If some of the 1981 material - maybe "Bully Bones", or "Blast Off" - had been traded out for something from "Wild World" and/or "Sonny's Burning"...that would really have been something. The material was there on the "Pleasure Heads Must Burn" live video, and it would have just made this album a bit better.
But other than that, there's just nothing bad to say about this album - provided you like the music, of course. The BP are something of an acquired taste, but if Nick Cave screaming and Rowland S. Howard inducing orgasmic screams from his six strings doesn't give you a headache...then this album is a must have.
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