BAUHAUS: MASK (1981)
1) Hair Of The Dog; 2) The
Passion Of Lovers; 3) Of Lillies And Remains; 4) Dancing; 5) Hollow Hills; 6)
Kick In The Eye; 7) In Fear Of Fear; 8) Muscle In Plastic; 9) The Man With
X-Ray Eyes; 10) Mask.
This critically respected (for the most part)
follow-up to Flat Fields is all
right, but, for the most part, it does not add anything particularly
unpredictable or even «useful» to the Bauhaus image. Formally, the band cannot
be accused of slackery — they bring in occasional new instrumentation (keyboards,
acoustic guitars, etc.), and Daniel Ash is as keen as ever to try out new
guitar sounds and fuss around with studio technology. But they have a
successful formula now, and they do make sure to stay well within its safe
boundaries. This ensures that the album, like its predecessor, is cozily
coherent, but there is really nothing that can be said about Mask in general that has not already
been said about Flat Fields in
general, so let's just chat about some of the individual songs instead — in
terms of favorites and «why favorites?».
Especially because this time, it is fairly easy
to choose a favorite — ʽHollow Hillsʼ is one of the band's best songs, and, for
that matter, one of the tiny handful of bona fide «goth» songs in their
catalog, a slow, creepy-crawly, atmospheric dirge, possibly inspired by an
Arthur Machen story, whose mystical bass line is amusingly similar to the one used
on Nirvana's ʽCome As You Areʼ (coincidence or was Bauhaus a closet love of
Kurt's?). It is not any less theatrical than any other Bauhaus song, so one is
not expected to shed sincere mournful tears for the abandoned magical hills
even if «so sad, love lies there still» — but Ash's clever overdubs and sound
effects still open the door to some sort of a different dimension. Never mind
the witches and the goblins and Oberon, the sound
of it all is much more meaningful than the literal sense.
The only other song on the album that lays more
emphasis on the atmosphere than on the beat is the title track — but it is
still a bit too distorted and industrialized for my tastes, especially when the
fuzzy grind of the rhythm guitar gets coupled with all the backwards tapes
prepared by Ash. Midway through it becomes something else, when the grind is
suffocated and a paranoid medievalistic mandolin-imitating acoustic guitar
starts playing in a ʽBattle Of Evermoreʼ fashion — yet even so, it is not
enough to make a satisfactory conclusion to the album, certainly not one that
would overwhelm the listener like a «grand finale» is supposed to.
The remaining eight songs are all rockers, and,
to a large extent, interchangeable — with few, if any, jaw-dropping melodic
discoveries, and pretty much the same message throughout: «if you really have to dance or, at least, tap your
foot to pop music, might as well make it dark, cool, and enigmatic». One of the
songs is even called ʽDancingʼ, and
its verbal listing of all the different ways to dance brings to mind a similar
enterprise once carried out by Roxy Music with ʽDo The Strandʼ — yes, back when
the odd pioneers of a new musical style were slyly taking the old pre-war genre
of «let-me-introduce-you-to-a-new-dance» and adapting it to a whole new world
of values. But in 1981, that world was already established, and here Bauhaus
just sound like a bunch of not particularly convincing also-rans.
As for the songs chosen for single release,
those were ʽKick In The Eyeʼ and ʽThe Passion Of Loversʼ, the former sounding
like Young Americans-era funkified David
Bowie with an extra touch of bass darkness laid on from the Berlin era and the
latter being yet another clone of early Joy Division style; the lyrics are
fairly well «gothic» ("the passion of lovers is for death" goes the
refrain, after all), but the atmosphere does not even reach the creepiness
level of ʽHollow Hillsʼ, let alone Joy Division themselves — Ash plays
interesting guitar lines that have nothing to do with death or decay, and
Murphy delivers the lyrics more like a beginning Elizabethan actor than like a
person who'd really want you to
consider the imminent link between love and death.
As you can probably already tell from the
review, I am not too fond of this record. Where Flat Fields added something
to the already well-formed world of «bleak post-punk», Mask actually allows to see better what that something was — a mask indeed, and a fairly sticky one. The
heroes of Flat Fields revelled in
their roles of sophisticated evil clowns, and their excitement at being let out
on the stage was contagious, but already on the second album it looks like they
are simply doing their job now, content with their wages and quietly sweating
and stagnating under the makeup. If not for Ash and his bag of studio tricks, Mask would be gruesomely boring; as it
is, it is still eminently listenable, just underwhelming. Brain-wise, the songs
seem sufficiently fleshed out to deserve a minor thumbs up, but the heart finds no
pleasure in most of this. (And just to make matters clear, yes, the album
«rocks», but what sort of New Wave album with a warped, screechy guitar tone
did not rock in 1981?).
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