Customer Reviews

Live 1981-82

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

All my Birthday Party LPs have sat gathering dust for over a decade, but the sight of this in the racks fired off neurons in the dusty corners of my brain. What an absolute moster of a band. For a while there nobody could touch them. I saw them in DC in 82, and this brought it all back. Now THIS is alternative, not Pearl Jam butchering some oldie that was lousy to begin with. Nick flagellates himself while the guitars test the limits of electricity, and the bass and drums thunder in unison, just barely holding the whole thing together... each song an emotional catharsis, wailing and shrieking until it lurches to a stop and twenty people clap. You don't dance to this music, you quiver and throb to it. So here's one to send all you Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson fans running back to mommy... Once upon a time there was a band called The Birthday Party, and they ruled the Kingdom far and wide...

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.

A superlative live album. Previously, the only available live Birthday Party recordings were the "Drunk on the Pope's Blood" e.p and the legally dubious "It's Still Living". This far surpasses both not only in passion and sound quality but in song selection as well. The fan favorites like Junkyard and She's Hit are here of course, but some obscurities like Bully Bones (I think the only other recorded version of this is on one of the Peel Sessions) and songs of which live versions have never been released, such as The Friend Catcher and a cover of the Stooges' Funhouse (which sounds as much like L.A. Blues as it does Funhouse), are also represented. All the individual members are in fine form with Rowland Howard's guitar work being the stand out. Has there ever been another guitarist who could combine such fury and solicitude? And what more can be sai about Nick Cave? Besides being one THE great lyricists, he also happens to be a fantastic performer and a man of much deadpan & sardonic wit. How the multi-varied personalities of this group managed to combine into such a fearsome, coherant whole is one of life's great mysteries, but one for which we should all be thankful.

A good representation of the Birthday Party live (for those of us who weren't there). All songs are stellar versions, even those hard to imagine live (orchestral arrangement on "Nick the Stripper" is well-compensated by guitars). There are two never-before-released songs, both of which are great (esp. "Pleasure Heads . . ."). And if you're still wondering about this album's merit, listen to their version of "Funhouse" (believe me, no matter what your expectations, it's better).

If you want some visual to accompany the audio, seek out the live Birthday Party video "Pleasure Heads Must Burn" -- two shows (one with Phill Calvert on drums & the other with Mick Harvey replacing him) separated by the video for "Nick the Stripper" (shot in a city dump, the extras being inmates from a local insane asylum). Therein contains video to document the song "Pleasure Heads . . .", which could not have been done justice in the studio (a la the MC5's "Black to Comm").

If you are brave enough to buy this CD, be prepared for this CD to scour your brain inside and out. It's fiendishly noisy. There was an old review I read on the internet with the band and Nick Cave had said that he was unimpressed with some of the recordings of that time because they did not capture the intensity of their live performances. After listening to this, I can see what he means. This is obnoxiously ferocious. The sort of take-no-prisoners live album that shreds it's instruments for an all-out aural assault. Some of the songs are virtually unrecognizable from their studio counterparts. While I've never gone to a Birthday Party concert, this CD would pretty much give me a clear indication about how it would be like. You could probably end up empty headed, sore and in desperate need of paraceteamol to cure that thumping headache. If you are brave enough to listen to this, make sure you have aspirin at the ready....because your headache could get nasty!

Every track here is a classic. Better than the studio versions. The bass and drums are set to pulverize, every note sounds like a punch in the stomach. The guitars are chaotic and Nick Cave is brilliant. I first heard the Birthday Party when I picked up the hits album when I was 16. I had never heard anything like it and was hooked immediately and spent the next few years tracking down all the studio releases. I was completed saturated and sated with the Birthday Party albums I had and eventually moved on to other bands. This album again has just blown me away. I'm hooked again. Great stuff.

The birthday party have always been one of my favorite bands. This record is so intense. The version of "KING INK" is terrifying and the vocals are absolutely psychotic. Makes A. Vega's hoots and hollers seem tame, sane and sad. This band existed when alternative music really was alternative. Pick it up and worship its intensity.

Nick Cave has always been one of these artists who is more than just a singer: he is a performer. He belongs on stage, in recent years with his Bad Seeds ensemble, and in the early years with The Birthday Party.
More punk rock orientated and with lyrics that seemd to be written more to be of a musical "guiding" function than to have any real literary pretentions, TBP is a live act al the way.

"The Birthday Party Live 81-82" offers two gigs, the first one in "The Venue" in London, the second one in Bremen, Germany. A nice but not all to memerable bonus track is included here, called "Funhouse", performed in Athens, Greece.

The first concerts gives you all the classic stuff: from the mind bending opener "Junkyard" which sets the tone for a "slambang-in-your-face evening", to "A dead song", and from the self-mockery of "Nick the Stripper", all the way to the blasting "Blast off!" and the biting "Release the bats".

The German gig has "Big-Jesus-trash-can", the hymn-for-a-car-wreck "Dead Joe", the theatrical spoof "Hamlet (Pow pow pow)" and a good performance of the hypnotic "She's hit".

So over fifty percent of the songs come from the quintessential "Junkyard", and, unfortunately, no songs from the last TBP output "Mutiny / The Bad Seeds", which is really a shame.

The live dvd "Pleasure heads must burn" however does contain live footages of songs from the last two E.P's like "Sonny's Burning", "The Six strings that drew blood", "Wild world" and "Pleasure avalanche".
Both CD and DVD are a must-have for everyone who still cherishes some nostalghia for the years with the maniacle and insane Caveman-with-the-blood-shed-eyes.

The Birthday Party is a really fantastic band. Their music is a real ear workout, combining euro metal, punk and a goth mentality that would put Trent Reznor to shame. If you're looking for something fresh and interesting, The Birthday Party is a good choice. To those who are fans of the newer Nick Cave stuff I can only say, "don't you want to hear Nick roar and bark and make donkey noises?" I, for one, do.

Let me start by saying I really like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. But as a teenager in the 80s, it was The Birthday Party's anti-music that I knew first. I went through a phase in my teen years that involved playing lots of The Birthday Party records, and doing precisely the sort of dangerous, angry things this music makes you want to do. By the time Nick Cave formed the Bad Seeds I was so totally sick of the Birthday Party and remember hearing "Kicking Against the Pricks" and thinking "Well, he has calmed down a bit, but otherwise, unremarkable, and besides - how good can a member of The Birthday Party actually be?" I then proceeded to ignore Nick Cave's work for 20 years. By the time I came back around to discover Nick Cave, I realize that I had missed out on a truly fantastic musical career of an extraordinarily talented songwriter. And I blame my early 80s over-dose and subsequent distaste for The Birthday Party as the root of it all. So how could I possibly praise a record that soured me to Nick Cave for so long? Well, ok, I do admit,... it is fun to hear this stuff one more time after so many decades!