My Review: Bauhaus - In The Flat Field

Bauhaus - In The Flat Field

The Light. The Darkness. Pathos. The Drama. The Hallucinations. The Impetus. The Challenge. The Error. The Horror. The Carnivorous Absence of Good. The Mental Projections. The Cold. The Caustic Game. The Acting. The Destination. The Destiny.

That's it: a small academic hemisphere on the streets of living spills over into the aforementioned words and creates the Theatre, the stage where acting is the starting point, not the escape, to fall into the vortex of pleasure with blood in the slits of the mind.

Bauhaus is not a band of talented young people in search of success. They are the disrespectful knives that wound the soporific pace of 1979: the Old Scribe accuses them of simply being obscene for an unnatural beauty, creating discomfort in the discomfort of pleasures that came out of the catacombs of a harmless daily wasting of time. Them: the lightning and the crash, the drama pumping in the meanders of an unconscious propensity for nothingness, covered, however, with follies (countless and substantial) that tinge the heart with a necessary quota of fear.

The Bauhaus as source, as a blowtorch that with the first single generated confusion, conflict, interest, sowing ferocious traps in clichés born with their wild disposition to quarrel.

Bauhaus is formed, two months go by and that song enters forever into the immense multitude sinfully waiting for an idyll: in those minutes we witness a birth.

In The Flat Field is a litter of wild spirits on parade, undisciplined and complex, majestically taking the skin off Post-Punk full of anachronistic profligacy. It took a handful of songs as an act against the amorphous ones, throwing salt as a challenge and using sounds in a different way, using some new ones as a further challenge, to set up a kitchen equipped for the preparation of an indigestible but necessary dish.

Which Dark? But when will this ridiculous conviction end? The four are horsemen playing with darkness, they certainly do not have the nihilistic form of Joy Division, the disconnection from reality of The Cure, or the poetry of The Sound. They are shadow painters who kick centuries of obscurantism to expand its boundaries, leaving, incredibly, a long trail of make-up of the dirtiest side of Glam: by pulling the handbrake, they have generated pelvic toxins in the spasms of behaviour that risked ending up, like a funnel without wounds, in the madness of the unconscious crowd.

A bundle of compositions that complicates the understanding of the events that took place just before because, like a catapult working in reverse, the songs settle down in the early seventies (musically speaking), while the enchanting Peter Murphy (acclaimed by Old Scribe as the best singer ever) writes oil drips coming from a school of souls locked in a dungeon. It is the skeletal (a coincidence? I don't think so...) cantor of the mind's perverse mechanisms who holds the story in his grasp, sentencing, suggesting, creating images and stories as if our physicality were to be slaughtered, to his greatest delight. Nightmares and tensions centrifuged together, labyrinths as a pastime, juggling with a throat that seems capable of bringing out a flood of spirits in search of a breath of air. A writing full of exaggerations, of illogical perversions, which amalgamate with a voice that, miraculous as a night without darkness, knows how to cross the listener to make him end up, exhausted, with scars in his heart. 

Nine acts, nine sponges, nine stab wounds, capable of transporting the corpses of our frightened beats into a fury (sound familiar?) and enjoy the sensory massacre provoked. The story of the album, the one that preceded it, is laden with mythology, clamorous lies, useless facts. What occurs in the two sides of the vinyl, on the other hand, is a painful recital of linked woes, of exhaustion that, once brought into the morgue of our thinking, succeeds in making a resounding impression. The instruments, like a bundle of wood packed with dynamite, expose themselves, naked, as they strip away centuries of outposts of unawareness, cutting the music in two: before them and after them. A musical perimeter within which each of the three musicians collects egos in blatant display, hoping that the Master of Storytelling will know not to disfigure them too much. The excellent production work leaves everyone disgruntled: a resounding draw is celebrated at the end of the game. Because, let's be clear, Peter can win alone as well as in company if he wants to….

It is precisely his mode of singing that will lead the American angel Rozz Williams to try to grasp its secrets: oceans are perhaps only kissed through music. The traffic lights of sounds light up with the gloomy colour of perversion and the exhilarating colour of continuous precipitation: missiles rain from that guitar, rocks fall from that bass, and the heart weeps as a result of the crushing given by toxic and innovative drumming. In so many line-ups, the rhythm section has been the base, hidden, through which they could win, performing more. But the two brothers set fire to Daniel Ash's ideas, tortured him and put a gag on him. There was only one condition: 'Dear Daniel, if you want to play with us, you can only do brilliant things'...

It happened, and Bauhaus became, with only one album on their backs, the band of reference for those who wanted to listen to glam while having their heads completely invaded by flights of attention-seeking bats.

They gave no room for nostalgia, they did not get into the ring to beat up bands that were all going in the same direction at the time. Here was the theatricality, the willingness to be derisory, to play as if the sky had taken an hour's rest.

The A-side is the most toxic, devastating, infamous and malignant: five spaceships full of radioactive waste glide over the audience to liquidate every advanced dream. Double Dare is an infamous execution of atrocious beauty, a theatre that opens its doors to commit murder at once. Slow, tribal, gothic because it is close to horror, the desecrating ability to give the guitar the task of being an unlistenable screech, but by which one ends up being captivated. Kevin Haskins towers, shaking the skins and setting the cavern on fire with the force of his drumsticks. David J seems to have come out of a mental stomach pump: he beats slowly, without blinking... Peter? Are you kidding me? We are not talking about the man who paints the flight of fear perfectly: the best actor to illuminate a story that at times can also be atrocious, to make the Rocky Horror Show envious. Yes, he's already a whole show in this track... Ash reduces Peter's eventual show and plays the grimacing child, blatantly but sublimely: impossible for there to be idyll between the two, possible, instead, for those souls to inspire twists as the opening song manages to do.

 

The second heart attack is brought on by the rhythmic cascade that gives the work its title: a running reflection, with the grating of sounds coming out of the grave of Daniel's guitar, a bloody sheet of metal inside the grey smoke of the bass that sweeps away Post-Punk, taking its fingertips to Olympus. Peter plays beautifully, fast crooning, full of sparks, barking at the sky like a wolf never lost but wounded, his inflamed uvula switching from low to high register with monstrous speed and skill. The guitar then chooses to become a film of sandpaper in the finale, and the long fade out is an overture to the next song...

Only two tracks, but fate has already ruled: it's pure devotion for these acerbic but dignified artists. Miracles will happen soon.

The first comes straight away with A God in an Alcove, which is, objectively, the embassy of glam rock that declares surrender: David Bowie stopped believing long ago, the New York Dolls are now ghosts, and it is up to the four of them to revive the glories of the past, but with the task of offering small doses of novelty. By the end of the song, one notices the changes of rhythm, the guitar swells, the bass vomits, and a drum kit waiting to rock but with black sticks. Violent, macabre (God, that chant, a neurotic babble that creates multiple orgasms in the finale), it waits with open arms for Dive, a machine-grind also here in the odour of Glam but more theatrically exaggerated, especially in the bass, unique and invincible, while the drumming definitely comes out of Joy Division's gymnasium. The singing is hysterical but joyful, playful, a blaze of salt in the garden of darkness.

Then the first Goddess, the first black rose, the first true example of the wingless gothic rot: the song falls into the heart, Spy in the Cab is an operation without anaesthesia, in the dark, with only one doctor who seems to be reciting the rosary more than operating, and it is Peter who gives the task to his voice to turn into a heap of sad claws, corrupted by the evilness given by spying in the meanders of the mind, giving continuous motions of bewilderment and discouragement, until Daniel's glacial distorted guitar increases the pathos and fear can only become the best possible friend at that moment. Double vocals, backing vocals and the need to sing like a poison dart inside our ears. By the end of the A-side one is already shattered, disheartened, destroyed.With stubborn conviction we turn the vinyl over and encounter the one song that does not have the same vigour as the others, yet exerts a power of fascination. But Small Talk Stinks is, surely, the band's future coming to the fore. Not too successful due to flimsy rules, but capable of intriguing as it hints at how Peter's acting is waiting to explode.

St. Vitus Dance: cross and delight of the album, the parenthesis, the amphitheatre, the storehouse of their skills, which limits itself to the little task with courage, disrespectful in taking Iggy Pop and ruining his make-up, slaughtering the Stooges, lightening them up, leaving them perplexed. Not a gem, but certainly adept at delivering a thrill.

An initial atomic bass, the drooling drumsticks and neurotic guitar, stretch the soul and present us with a new scaffolding (with a frighteningly large stylistic figure), which make Stigmata Martyr a resounding case of wild connection to frenzy, to the masks exhibited in sounds and images, a bony, long linear rite, a mass celebrated in the mud of a place full of rage, held at bay by the unmatched acting skills of all four members. Plays of light ripped from nightmares are channelled into the guitar, the temple of pain, which, together with Kevin's drumming, makes possible the perception that the words written by Peter seem to want to hide. It is possible to be nihilistic without using the mania of excess: all you have to do is involve the desire for sonic exploration towards the dirty side of Rock and Roll and you're done. Few notes played, but with the strategy of making it all appear like a cloud of instruments hungry to create chaos. 

The recitative returns, the guitar plays on two expressive modes and hardens, even becoming capable of crossing over into the most unknown psychedelia, but doing so ferociously. The album seems to have been born to arrive at this song, which is essential as it distributes all the qualities of the guys, seriously engaged in drawing the bark of perfection...

Now the Old Scribe wishes he were already dead, buried, not responsible for a difficult and indigestible task, because this song is absolutely what he considers to be the masterpiece of their entire discography. The magic, the toxic cloud, the sewage, the awkward smells, the feeling of industrial-derived putrefaction is an absolute certainty: the fright so dear to Black Sabbath here materialises, with an added cabaret vein given by a piano that hypnotises like the grin of an amorphous angel falling into the powerful and devastating voice of Peter, in this case a genial pissed-off shaman, neurotic, sublime in the pauses and in giving space to the play of sighs of the same piano, to inhale into the microphone, making us feel the weight of the scene of which he tells us the evolution. A scream that becomes a rapturous mantra, a warlike vociferation, a satanic doing inside the orderly orchestra of a rhythm that seems cruelly inclined, starting precisely from Black Sabbath, to arrive at the gates of Killing Joke. Bauhaus, however, plays as a frightening need to confuse identities. A procession of symbolic references that would make some American writers happy (Poe and Lovecraft, no less...), to lead them around in the channels of their madness, displacing them with their nightmares, to give fear a place in which to expire without any doubt. Nerves is a looming necessity, a torture, skilfully slow in the manner of its inception, only to be capable of a poignant, vomitous caress, which knows the increase in speed. 

We must add the impressive amount of work that listening induces our souls to perform: nine songs as unsolved, postdated cheques of our perception, challenges that thousands of approaches will not be able to decipher. The most obvious miracle consists of the propensity to reject this album, only to fall into the precipice of an invitation that the four do not tire of. In The Flat Field is by far the only 'almost' Gothic masterpiece we are fascinated by and often addicted to.

Meanwhile, somewhere inside us, there are alarms and petrol spies in a strange pact: to be able to turn off the light for a moment and be like these violent performances of extraordinary beauty...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

12th June 2023