Bauhaus - New Album!

[Adrian]

BAUHAUS - ‘GO AWAY WHITE’

“I come with this darkness and go away white.”Bauhaus slid fully formed from punk rock's womb in late 1978.
Over the course of four hot years, they unintentionally birthed a genre (Goth), moved on, moved forward, and surged mercurial through the post-punk music scene, tearing into tense, stark, dub bass-driven new-wave, T-Rex-esque glam, and swirling, clattering, orchestral atmospherics, whilst churning it all into a grand velvet, Rimbaudian hallucination. It was a wild, inspired, enthralling sound.
And it still is.
Now there is a new record.‘Go Away White’ was recorded in 18 days at Zircon Skye in Ojai, with singer Peter Murphy, bassist David J, guitarist Daniel Ash, and drummer Kevin Haskins playing together as a band in one room, taking first takes as final cuts. So, a new record but apparently a final one, the band having decided to release it as a posthumous swan song.‘Go Away White’ is everything you would hope Bauhaus would deliver as their final statement. Fronted by a cover photo of Bethesda, the angel of the healing waters in New York's Central Park, the music inside is pure cathartic renovation, a psychedelic glimpse into an enchanted moment. Aided in part by guitarist Daniel Ash's inspired use of Jimi Hendrix's own personal Vox wah wah pedal, gifted to him by Peter Murphy at the start of the sessions, it is pop as much as it is experimental. The 10 songs on ‘Go Away White’channel the kind of magic timelessness you could imagine on a mighty bill with Joy Division, Bowie, Devo, the Creatures, Antony, My Bloody Valentine, and Kraftwerk--with Oscar Wilde playing master of ceremonies.As the NME once said, "Bauhaus are to Goth, what Radiohead are to Prog."It's all building blocks. Give ‘Go Away White’ an honest minute and you'll realize that The Klaxons, The Killers, The Rapture and Foals all got their beats from Bauhaus, and how--without them--there would be no Nine Inch Nails or Jane's Addiction or Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, AFI, TV on the Radio, Interpol, Hot Hot Heat or LCD Sound System.

The accomplishments of the band are too many to list here but to touch lightly, there are the four studio albums: ‘In the Flat Field’ (1980), ‘Mask’ (1981), ‘The Sky's Gone Out’ (1982), and ‘Burning from the Inside’ (1983). There is the riveting appearance with David Bowie in the movie,‘The Hunger’.
There are the classic Peel sessions and the hits--seismic rumbles such as ‘She's in Parties’, ‘Kick in the Eye’,’Stigmata Martyr’, and the great, epic, pillar of ether and brooding, psychedelia, that is "Bela Lugosi's Dead."So, an end but an end with one final sonorous statement. Behold ‘Go Away White’.

Watch as night comes, as day breaks and the light . . . pours . . . in.

--Adam Gnade

Worldwide release date is March 4, 2008

[proggrl]

Ahhh yes. I have been waiting for this ever since I first heard Love and Rockets. bleh.

[sorrowbox]

I find it fascinating how they went in "with nothing prepared" (according to Haskins), didn't rehearse, finished the recording in mere 18 days, and didn't even rework the first takes -- and yet the album came out just fine. It seems that they work amazingly well on the musical level and always have; In The Flat Field took them only two weeks. Then again, they said that there were lots of quarrels, not different from the early days. Even the interviews are a mess. "It was torture!" - "No, it wasn't." - "I wanted to go on, but you decided to gang up on me!" - "Hey, we're all glad it's finally over, aren't we?!" -- Whatever, guys.

Anyways, I gave the album a listen, and on the one hand, it has the pleasant feel of -- well, as if you'd stepped into a time capsule, with the exception of the better technical quality of the recording. Plain awesome. On the other hand, none of the tracks really left a lasting impression. I mean, some titles just reach out and grab you and never let go, but not here. It's not a bad album, though, and I wonder if it just has to grow on me after repeated listening -- sometimes it happens, I still remember how I loathed The Cure's Bloodflowers when hearing it for the first time.