The Birthday Party: Live 1981-82

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: LIVE 1981-82 (1999; 1981-1982)

1) Junkyard; 2) A Dead Song; 3) The Dim Locator; 4) Zoo-Music Girl; 5) Nick The Stripper; 6) Blast Off!; 7) Release The Bats; 8) Bully Bones; 9) King Ink; 10) (Sometimes) Pleasure Heads Must Burn; 11) Big-Jesus-Trash-Can; 12) Dead Joe; 13) The Friend Catcher; 14) 6" Gold Blade; 15) Hamlet; 16) She's Hit; 17) Funhouse.

Although The Birthday Party pretty much built up their reputation through live performance, they never released a live album while the band was still active — possibly because they felt no need, what with the studio records already letting off as much steam as any live performance could accumulate. The first «semi-official» Birthday Party live LP only came out about two years after the split — It's Still Living, capturing an Australian show from 1982, was released by their former manager without anybody's consent, and is usually chastised for vastly inferior sound quality and other problems.

It took almost two more decades before an archival Birthday Party live release finally appeared that could sort of serve as a proper «benchmark» for evaluating and enjoying the band's sound. Here, everything was improved — courtesy of the respectable 4AD label, the performances are well-recorded and nicely cleaned up, and the setlists offer a fine retrospective of the Party's career, focusing primarily on Prayers On Fire and Junkyard, unquestionably their two finest offerings, but also featuring some rarities and oddities. Most of the material was culled from two shows in London and Bremen; a historically important bonus piece is the recording of ʽFunhouseʼ by their spiritual forefathers, The Stooges, in Athens from September 1982, although, unfortunately, it is also the one track that suffers the most from near-bootleg sound quality.

I should emphatically stress, though, that The Birthday Party live do not get much wilder than The Birthday Party in the studio — frankly speaking, it would be hard to imagine how they could get much wilder than that, unless it meant dragging out random audience members on stage and cutting their hearts out in black voodoo rituals (and even then, you'd have to get this on DVD to genuinely enjoy the proceedings). But on the other hand, The Birthday Party live do not get any less wild than The Birthday Party in the studio — if this was really typical of their live sound, it means they could work themselves to exhaustion every night, and still come back for more. From the first track and right down to the last one, each single member of the band is playing at the top of his powers, and Nick's devil roar never sags, not even for a second.

From an audiophile point of view, these recordings could actually be preferable to some of the original takes — in the studio, the band went for too much echo and lo-fi, whereas here all the instruments are completely out front: the vicious lead guitar parts on ʽDim Locatorʼ, for instance, shoot at point blank range into your ears here, whereas on the original version they sounded rather remote. You may like or dislike it, but it does make the listening experience significantly different — a rare case of an underground band's archival live release sounding «cleaner» than what they did in the studio, and one that may offer additional insight into the art of Mick Har­vey's and Rowland Howard's guitar playing. Or compare Tracy Pew's bass on the original ʽShe's Hitʼ and the almost ʽDazed And Confusedʼ-style thick doom sounds on this version — it's like he's tugging at these strings from inside your own head. On the other hand, that studio echo did account for some extra eeriness, so that it is impossible to objectively prefer one over the other.

The final performance of ʽFunhouseʼ, adding guest player Jim Thirlwell on saxophone, would be a more than perfect conclusion here if the sound quality were reasonable, but even as such it is still a noisy sensation — every time the guitar, the sax, and the singer lock forces in a hysterical outburst, on the illusionary verge of totally losing control, we have Bedlam incarnate, though it is interesting to go back and listen, for comparative purposes, to Iggy doing this stuff on the original Funhouse. The Stooges were summoning the flames of Hell — the Birthday Party sound much more like your local madhouse band, celebrating the joys of clinical insanity rather than demonic possession. It may simply have something to do with Nick's «mooing» voice not having as much guttural power as Iggy, but you could also say this about Ron Asheton vs. Rowland Howland (the former makes his instrument sound like a spray hose of hellflames, the latter prefers to evoke the atmosphere of a serious nervous breakdown), so yeah, similar intentions, different spirits.

Finally, we are offered occasional glimpses of Nick Cave's tender side — through bits of stage banter like "thank you, I love your haircut as well", casually, but respectfully cast off towards somebody in the audience right before launching into a fiery version of ʽZoo-Music Girlʼ. As few as they are, they are important — seventy minutes of this unending assault and battery might make you feel that we are dealing with a bunch of psychopaths beyond salvation (an alternate version of GG Allin and friends), so even a single nicely spoken sentence of sanity, dropped in casually like that, can be reassuring, and further confirming the obvious thumbs up and the ob­vious recommendation to pick this up and never let it go.

Birthday Party: Mutiny / The Bad Seed

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: MUTINY / THE BAD SEED (1982-1983; 1989)

1) Sonny's Burning; 2) Wildworld; 3) Fears Of Gun; 4) Deep In The Woods; 5) Jennifers Veil; 6) Six Strings That Drew Blood; 7) Say A Spell; 8) Swampland; 9) Pleasure Avalanche; 10) Mutiny In Heaven.

After Junkyard, The Birthday Party had no place left to go. They'd taken the formula to its abso­lute extreme — one more step in the same direction and the band would have exploded in its own madness. On the other hand, there could be no talk of stopping and stagnating, either: Nick Cave was not about to let his band turn into an endlessly self-repeating hardcore-goth-mix machine, forever releasing inferior sequels to Junkyard. There had to be some changes made, but this meant running into internal creative conflicts. Throw in some trouble with the rhythm section (drummer Phil Calvert was fired for alleged loss of competence, and bassist Tracy Pew had tem­porarily vanished from the radar due to law troubles), and the end becomes predictable.

The Bad Seed, an Evangelical title that Nick would eventually appropriate for his next band's name, and Mutiny were two EPs that the band released over their last troubled year of existence, later to be put together on one CD and now seen as the Birthday Party's last testament. It is very tempting to call them «transitional», a bridge between classic Birthday Party and early Bad Seeds, but that would depend on how one actually perceives the difference between B.P. and B.S. As far as I can see, the arrival of Blixa Bargeld to replace Rowland S. Howard as Nick's principal spar­ring partner was the principal change from one to the other — Howard's flashy, psychotic style of playing always took a lot of emphasis off Nick's performance, whereas Bargeld would rather play off Cave, adapting his guitar parts to attenuate the man's self-expression.

From that point of view, Mutiny/The Bad Seed is still a bona fide Birthday Party record, even despite the fact that Bargeld already appears on ʽMutiny In Heavenʼ, adding a distant wall of industrial clang in the background. On the general scale of «intensity», these EPs, I'd say, fall way below Junkyard, but still remain above Prayers On Fire. Only a couple of songs, like ʽSwamplandʼ, sound like they could have been outtakes from the Birthday Party's aggressive peak — the rest are either slower than usual, or more disciplined than usual, or, sometimes, more subtle and quietly spooky than usual (not in a «Bad Seeds» way, though).

Nothing is radically new, but the songs, particularly on the Bad Seed EP, are still perfectly written and executed. Nick's "HANDS UP WHO WANTS TO DIE?" at the beginning of ʽSon­ny's Burningʼ is as classic a Birthday Party moment as anything, and the rest of the song gallops along like a mix of hardcore epic with old style psychedelia, with the chainsaw buzz replaced by (catchy!) acid guitar riffs and mind-twirling «astral» leads. ʽFears Of Gunʼ is only a tad slower, more in a jazz/blues-rock vein, but a viciously murderous one, as bits of guitar shrapnel fly in all directions while Mr. Cave is running down the street, loudly announcing that "the fears of Gun are the fears of everyone" («Gun» is animated and personalized in this song).

On the opposite side of the business, ʽWildworldʼ and ʽDeep In The Woodsʼ lean towards the Goth angle, particularly the latter, all of it hanging upon a cruel descending bassline, each bar taking us deeper and deeper in the woods where "the woods eats the woman and dumps her ho­ney body in the mud", well, you can imagine the rest. I do have to say, though, that after Junk­yard, these spooky horror shows come across as a little too grotesque and theatrical: way too many DIEs, DEATHs, and DEADs rolled up in gravel for the hyperbole to work in a properly intimidating (rather than black-humorous) manner. Of course, once Rowland S. Howard cuts in with all of his «wounded mammoth» might, everything is forgiven.

As for the last EP, it sounds a bit too fussy and disorganised, with fairly strange rockers like ʽSix Strings That Drew Bloodʼ that never seem to properly understand whether they are headed for musical coherence or musical chaos. ʽJennifer's Veilʼ and ʽSay A Spellʼ tread the same turd as ʽWildworldʼ, but with less interesting results. Only ʽSwamplandʼ, a convict-on-the-run perfor­mance that initiates Nick's decades-long series of scum-of-the-earth impersonations, truly stands out in its relentless punch — Cave seems invigorated by the very idea that his «madman» image can be put to more realistic use, and if you thought you could do without any more throat-tearing screaming after the entirety of Junkyard, you might at least make an exception for his "down in swampland...!", delivered as if the hound dogs were already tearing at his calves, pulling him down in the filthy muck.

On their own, the songs are strong enough to merit an unquestionable thumbs up — in terms of the global curve, though, these EPs mark relative stagnation. Nobody questions the ability of Cave and Howard to come up with «hook after hook», vocal-wise or guitar-wise, but emotion-wise, they all sound now like variations on themes fully explored before, and while that might have kept old veteran fans of the band happy, it sure didn't keep the band members happy. New configurations were necessary, so it is only natural that ʽMutiny In Heavenʼ concludes the al­bum on a note of new partnership: Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld, meeting up in Berlin after the Birth­day Party relocated there in 1982, disappointed with the London scene. And really, we should all be happy: The Birthday Party lived the exact amount of time it was supposed to live, reaching its absolute peak and breaking up at the first signs of stagnation, its members re-emerging in fresh new formats. Good lesson for too many people who refuse to learn.

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Birthday Party: Junkyard

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: JUNKYARD (1982)

1) Blast Off; 2) She's Hit; 3) Dead Joe; 4) The Dim Locator; 5) Hamlet; 6) Several Sins; 7) Big-Jesus-Trash-Can; 8) Kiss Me Black; 9) 6" Gold Blade; 10) Kewpie Doll; 11) Junkyard; 12*) Dead Joe; 13*) Release The Bats.

This is a monster record if there ever was one. Okay, there was one: Fun House by the Stooges, released twelve years earlier. But in a whole twelve years, during which dozens of genres had come and gone, the world hadn't truly seen another monster record. Punk, post-punk, heavy metal, Goth, sheer sonic hooliganry Throbbing Gristle-style, the world had it all, but nothing really came close to the blazing, genuinely frightening musical hell of Fun House. Somebody had to match that achievement in the Eighties, and why are we not surprised that the «somebody» would be Mr. Nicholas Edward Cave from Australia?

The nightmarish fun begins already on the album sleeve — look at the picture closely and yes, this is more or less what the music sounds like. The color palette is a little too... colorful, perhaps (I'd rather see this in black and white), but other than that, the diversity of elements, their absur­dity, their energized appearance, and their sheer ugliness, everything driven to hyperbolic heights, totally fits in with the songs, or, rather, the nightmarish rituals that The Birthday Party has chosen to perform. And I'm assuming that the album sleeve pictures their sacred altar.

Interestingly enough, the original LP, which only contained ten tracks, did not start with ʽBlast Off!ʼ — it was the B-side to a concurrent single. When the album was released on CD, however, the song was not simply tacked on as a bonus track (like its A-side, ʽRelease The Batsʼ, notable for being the «Goth»-est number released by the band and allegedly much favored by Bauhaus fans); instead, they put it on top as the album's flagman, for reasons so obvious that it is now hard for me to imagine how Junkyard would have ever fared without it. Briefly put, ʽBlast Off!ʼ is a loud and proud signal for that thingamabob on the album sleeve to... blast off. This is Captain Beefheart gone berserk, a flurry of avantgarde-influenced drum rolls, bass runs, and dissonant guitar shrieks, on top of which Crazy Captain Cave announces that the band is finally moving out. Prayers On Fire showed us the mustering of the forces inside the asylum; Junkyard flings the asylum doors open, and out pours the scary army of Lunacy, Epilepsy, and Maniac Behavior.

Viewed from that angle, the first side of Junkyard is pretty much flawless. Most of the tunes deal with violence and death; only one, ʽThe Dim Locatorʼ, focuses primarily on pure insanity as such — the melody can be traced all the way back to Kurt Weill, but the mood is «square root of Jim Morrison multiplied by Iggy Pop», and now they have this disgustingly dirty, swampy, lo-fi, echoey production, too, that makes it all sound like it was recorded in a particularly filthy sewer. One in which a zombie-faced Nick Cave is wading, knee-dip in muck and shit, grumbling and snarling: "They call me Dim, I am the Dim Locator, loco-lomo-loco-lomo-wow-wow-wow". It ain't a pretty sight, but it sure looks realistic enough to want to take cover.

But a bigger bet is staked on sheer visceral brutality: ʽDead Joeʼ jackhammers your guts into your spine with Motörhead intensity, as the song tries to recreate the impression of a «car crash apoca­lypse» and the ensuing panic ("you can't tell the girls from the boys anymore"), and ʽHamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow!)ʼ does the same thing, but sadistically takes extra time to arrive at the desired effect — the «Hamlet» in question, transferred to modern times, is now the equivalent of a reli­gious psychopath ("Hamlet got a gun now, he wears a crucifix"), a hidden menace that trots around at a brisk jazzy tempo before exploding, every once in a while, in a series of snarling pow-pow-pows as «Hamlet» gets carried away.

On the other side of the street, ʽShe's Hitʼ andʽSeveral Sinsʼ move slowly and refrain from des­cen­ding into sheer utter epileptic madness, but then again, even the maddest madmen should take a break from rolling on the floor foaming at the mouth from time to time. And there is some genuine emotional depth here — behind all the discordant jazz-punk wailing of ʽShe's Hitʼ Nick manages to put down an atmosphere of tragic sadness, while ʽSeveral Sinsʼ counts off the begin­ning of his fire-and-brimstone streak ("I forgot to tell you several things, Ma, I forgot to tell you 'bout the seven sins"). The song is also interesting in that it announces the arrival of Barry Adam­son, temporarily replacing Tracy Pew on bass while the latter was doing a two-month term for drunk driving — Adamson would later go on to become one of the Bad Seeds. Not that ʽSeveral Sinsʼ is a particularly complex track, bass-wise, but Barry quickly gets in the general gloomy groove of the band, and helps make the song a true «dead letter tale» as it promises in its opening line. The only question is, how in the world could they all turn in such a credible performance when they barely had something like twenty-five years or so to indulge in the seven sins?

If there is one general flaw on Junkyard, it is the length: forty minutes may be a bit too much even for the veteran listener, especially considering that Side B of the disc does not stray too far from the same territory, and may give the impression of the band getting a little tired, or maybe it's just the listener who got tired. ʽBig Jesus Trash Canʼ walks pretty much the same turf as ʽBlast Off!ʼ, ʽKiss Me Blackʼ raises the same ruckus as ʽDead Joeʼ, the title track is a slow-bur­ning dirge that does not exceed the effects of ʽShe's Hitʼ, and so on. Individually, each song is strong, but collectively, it does begin to get a bit samey after a while, and this, I am afraid to say, cheapens the overall experience: being shocked to the bone at the sight of an epileptic shaking in convulsions is one thing — having to watch him do it for half an hour and slowly getting used to it, let alone getting bored with it, is another. Consequently, it might make sense to listen to Junk­yard one side at a time.

No matter what your particular preference might be, though, Junkyard remains the album that The Birthday Party was sent into this world to leave us with. Some might find it too far out, too violent, too messy, and prefer the slightly more subtle and, if I may say so, slightly more «poppy» Prayers On Fire instead, but the way I see it, if you are born into this world to be a gut-puller, then the harder you pull on those guts, the better you are fulfilling your destiny. On Junkyard, Nick and his friends are not merely engaging in senseless musical hooliganry — they are engine­ering an avantgarde masterpiece that may not be as inventive and revolutionary as Trout Mask Replica, but sounds much more meaningful to my ears. This is more than just a regular thumbs up: Junkyard should, by all means, end up on all the representative top lists for the decade.

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Birthday Party: Prayers On Fire

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: PRAYERS ON FIRE (1981)

1) Zoo-Music Girl; 2) Cry; 3) Capers; 4) Nick The Stripper; 5) Ho-Ho; 6) Figure Of Fun; 7) King Ink; 8) A Dead Song; 9) Yard; 10) Dull Day; 11) Just You And Me; 12) Blundertown; 13) Kathy's Kisses.

Hee Haw was mighty good, but this LP and its follow-up are the real shit when we speak of The Birthday Party. For one thing, it sounds like nothing else — the band has not only found, but laid a unique claim to their own identity, impossible to confuse with Bauhaus, Joy Division, or any other single New Wave band, UK or elsewhere. For another (or maybe it's the same thing, just differently stated), the band has «unleashed the fuckin' fury», to quote an undying classic. I am not sure about any actual praying going on, but «on fire» gets it just about right.

For some reason, Nick Cave later admitted embarrassment about ʽZoo-Music Girlʼ (maybe be­cause of the lyrics and their objectifying the lady of Nick's dreams a bit too overtly?), but it's hard to make out the words anyway; what is important is the collective onslaught — drums, bass, or­gan, guitar, vocals: five berserk warriors zig-zagging around the compound, trampling out every­thing in their path. This is mad, mad, mad tribal music, a shamanistic whirlwind, yet with just the right amount of self-control so as to never fall apart, and be able to quickly pick itself up after each pause of its tricky stop-and-start structure. And then the brass part comes in, and hoopla, it is suddenly a schizophrenic avantgarde jazz masterpiece. What's to be embarrassed of?

The true power of Prayers On Fire is not in the amount of sheer ruckus it manages to generate — it is in its insanely unexpectable quantity of melodic ideas. The «songs», or, rather, dashing musical disgorgements, are chockfull with stunning Rowland S. Howard riffs, acid organ parts, and spooky basslines; at least one of these distinguishes every song, and sometimes, all three do battle with each other. On ʽCryʼ, Howard and Harvey both wield guitars, first playing against each other, then complementing Nick on the chorus with united series of arpeggios that formally represent the protagonist «crying» over his girl dumping him. But the «cry» in question, be it Nick's vocals or the two guitarists' choking trills, is not really a cry — more like a madman's agonizing gurgle, or an epileptic fit. Very naturalistic.

The band's «goth» angle, in the meantime, has evolved to the level of ʽNick The Stripperʼ, which makes additional use of the talents of the Melbourne jazz combo Equal Local (the album was re­corded in Australia) and, consequently, sounds a bit like «lounge jazz from hell», where Equal Local's brass section is the hot, sensual, glamorous counterpart to the black devil sound of the bass and Nick's voice, intentionally mangling "insect" and "incest" as if the change of just one sound doesn't really do a hell of a lot of difference. The ʽNickʼ of the song may refer to anybody, but in this particular context, it is clearly understood as self-referential: "Nick the Stripper, a-hi­deous to the eye, well he's a fat little insect..." — self-hatred was rarely, if ever, expressed with so much animal brutality as it is on this song.

Of course, the basic emotional content of all the songs is more or less the same, and this makes it hard to comment on the individual tracks. «Confusion», «frustration», «infuriation», «insanity», all of these abstractions and their closest neighbors rule on every track, generated in tandem by all of the musicians — the greatness of The Birthday Party is in the fact that everybody contributed on the level, everybody strove to add their own pinch of tightly controlled (or loosely controlled) chaos. As far as songwriting is concerned, Cave gets credited on most of the tracks, but usually in collaboration with Howard, and sometimes Howard is the only credited writer, e. g. on the ominous piano rocker ʽDull Dayʼ — in reality, though, this is very much a collective product; I could not imagine the songs having nearly the same impact if even one of the players here sud­den­ly slacked out and remained there to simply fill the required space.

Nick himself was particularly proud of ʽKing Inkʼ, which has possibly the creepiest bass melody on the entire album, but is not so good guitar-wise (too much noise, not enough geometrically insulting melody). Me, I prefer «Nick the demented patient» of ʽA Dead Songʼ, also not particu­larly exciting melodically, but featuring his most expressive and credible performance on the entire record — credible, as in «this really makes you believe the guy spent several weeks in the madhouse to observe and practice». But in reality, these preferences differ by split hairs: the al­bum has to be swallowed as a whole (plus the two bonus tracks on the CD edition, of which ʽKathy's Kissesʼ, a stumbling, stuttering post-punk deconstruction of Kurt Weillian cabaret, is a particular highlight), and the thumbs up rating applies in near-equal mode to all of its parts.

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Birthday Party: Hee Haw

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: HEE HAW (1979-1980; 1988)

1) Mr. Clarinet; 2) Happy Birthday; 3) Hats On Wrong; 4) Guilt Parade; 5) The Friend Catcher; 6) Waving My Arms; 7) Catman; 8) Riddle House; 9) A Catholic Skin; 10) The Red Clock; 11) Faint Heart; 12) Death By Drowning; 13) The Hair Shirts.

Technical note first. The CD edition of Hee Haw, released long after the ashes of The Birthday Party had been scattered by the wind, actually consists of (a) The Birthday Party — the band's LP debut from 1980; and (b) Hee Haw, an EP from late 1979 which they still released under the earlier name of The Boys Next Door. Prior to that, The Boys Next Door had an even earlier LP release, appropriately titled Door, Door, but since it was poorly recorded, released on a com­plete­ly unknown minor Australian label, and Nick Cave has subsequently pretty much disowned it as a childish first attempt, we will let it pass by here. Special mention must be made of an early epoch, scattered bits of which are still preserved in Australian TV archives, when Nick Cave used to dress up for public appearances and seemed to take his primary cue from Paul Weller.

But forget about it, anyway. The real career of The Birthday Party starts with the move to Lon­don, by which time the five Australian boys (not all of them next door) had gotten their act together and not only knew exactly what they wanted to do, but also knew exactly how to get it done. The Birthday Party played its own version of «art-punk», a fairly unique brand of music that com­bined elements of garage rock, hardcore punk, avantgarde jazz, goth, electronica — anything goes, really, as long as the production style is hot, sweaty, and jungly, the lead singer sounds like a madhouse client imagining himself to be Tarzan, and the two major players (Rowland S. Ho­ward on guitar and Mick Harvey on just about anything) make as much noise as possible.

«Oh no», you'd say, «not another early Eighties' band of crazy noisemakers!» But throw on ʽMr. Clarinetʼ, and from the very outset you will find that this amounts to much more than crazy noise­making. The Birthday Party were not slackers — they learned not only how to play those instru­ments, but also how to combine them in complex, innovative ways without it all falling apart. Harvey's heavily distorted organ (substituting for an actual clarinet, I guess) plays sort of a psy­chedelic fugue, against which Nick Cave is howling and bellowing like a prime patient that's been subjected to way too many re-runs of Alban Berg operas. The abstract absurdity of the results separates them from the punks, but neither is this poppy enough to put them in the same house with Siouxsie & The Banshees, nor is it solemn-demonic enough to warrant a comparison with Joy Division. First track = first head-scratching enigma.

Things become a lot clearer when they get to ʽHappy Birthdayʼ, arguably the quintessential track of the album (and the one that is connected to the band's crucial name change — from the direct, but boring Boys Next Door to the symbolic Birthday Party). If ʽMr. Clarinetʼ left any doubts, ʽHappy Birthdayʼ dissipates them — this is Modern Madhouse Music at its modern maddest. In the deep past, the Stooges used to conjure this spirit, but the Stooges, being good kids of the Six­ties, accessed their psychic innards on the express train of sexual tension: Iggy channelled his aggression into physical lust, whereas The Birthday Party direct their youthful adrenaline into the brain areas responsible for maniac depression, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. Of course, there is a social basis for these disorders — it ain't much fun to play mad unless you can convincingly prove that it is your society who drove you to this brink. In the first case, you're just playing mad; in the second case, who knows? You might be producing A-R-T.

ʽHappy Birthdayʼ, with its spooky tale of a «wonderful dog chair... that could count right up to ten» (I wish I had one!), is the perfect example — tricky, off-putting time signature; knife-edged, ribbon-cutting bluesy/funky guitar riffage; and the perfect send-up of the happy «birthday cho­rus» where you get to hear Nick Cave woof-woof-woofing, consciously and passionately «rui­ning» an actually catchy vocal pop melody. In doing so, The Birthday Party created just the per­fect birthday song to crash, bust, and burn any birthday party that you'd wish to avoid, but can't, seeing as how it was cruelly sprung on you by circumstances beyond your control. And as far as I can tell, nobody knows anything about the woofing dog chair. Still one of those mysteries.

If the songs do get more «tight» and «collected», they start sounding too dangerously close to their competition — a case in point is ʽWaving My Armsʼ, which anybody could easily mistake for a lost Bauhaus outtake, what with the dark gothic bassline, the echoey jangling guitar, and the repetitive, but thoroughly disciplined chorus. None of which means it is bad — on the contrary, it is the album's most easily memorable song, rallying the band to action like a deranged set of the Four Horsemen's cousins: the line "and we won't get to sleep for fifty thousand years" will pro­bably keep ringing in your ears longer than anything else off the album (with the possible excep­tion of "woof woof woof woof woof").

Speaking of the Stooges comparison and the alleged «asexuality» of the songs, ʽCatmanʼ, if you just look at the lyrics, should, of course, count as an example to the contrary — "catman's coming, looking for a girl, better hide your sister, man" — but even if Nick's yelps and yowls are clearly influenced by Iggy, he still sounds like a man in a straitjacket, chained to the battery, his major problem never descending anywhere below his head; and Rowland Howard's guitar is still re­veling in droning, atonality, and complicated patterns that are way too intellectually controlled and experimental to be counted as «penis-driven». It might be best to simply ignore the lyrics (many of which, at this point, seem crude and underworked anyway) and just bang your head against the wall instead. If you get to do this on time, you get to experience the complete bliss package of The Birthday Party.

In conclusion, the only flaw of this package is a comparative one — in retrospect, it now looks like a masterful rehearsal before the genuine thunderstorm of Prayers On Fire — and it should by no means lessen the sincerity of the thumbs up. Nor is the average quality of the original Hee Haw EP, appended here as a bonus, any less impressive: early «jazz-goth» pieces like ʽThe Red Clockʼ and ʽFaint Heartʼ have their share of inventiveness and spookiness, too. No wonder the boys would blow all competition off the stage back in the early Melbourne days — even those who consider their early efforts too silly and immature will have to respect the level of playing and internal coordination.

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