When everyone else I knew was listening to Joy Division and talking about how cool and dark Ian Curtis was, I was listening to the FUCKING BIRTHDAY PARTY. Nick Cave's first band.
The Birthday Party is why I could never fully appreciate Joy Division. Joy Division was sad and isolated, due mostly because of production by Martin Hannett. Even Peter Hook had this to say about Martin Hannett's contribution, " There's no two ways about it, Martin Hannett created the Joy Division sound." To the Birthday Party isolation was ipso facto, like 'uhm yeah being fucked up and young means isolation dude, duh'. Probably having a lot due to being from Australia, an island the size of a continent with less people living there than the U.S. The Birthday Party had their sad theatrical moments, see songs Several Sins, Wild World, and well, like their whole discography up to half of Prayers on Fire. I'll have no argument or conjecture about it MY Birthday Party is Junkyard and the Bad Seeds/Mutiny EPs. Prayers on Fire is awesome, but the absolute brutal introspective pain that's captured on the aforementioned records is astounding. Rowland S. Howard's brutal reverb guitar dissonance, Tracy Pew's Funk-Sex-It-Thing bass, and both Phill Calvert and Mick Harvey's percussions are intense and driving: aggression coming to euphoric crescendos on songs like Junkyard, Dead Joe, Hamlet Pow Pow Pow, and Sonny's Burning.
If you don't know who Nick Cave is then you should get out from under a rock. Nick Cave is at my most favorite period of his, drunk, addicted, abusive, rock and roll poet escaped from hell repenting to heaven. And as a special treat Blixa Bargeld plays guitar on the Mutiny EP track Mutiny In Heaven, which is also the last track of the last record by The Birthday Party. I mean, even Henry Rollins gets wet in the pants about THE FUCKING BIRTHDAY PARTY.
A couple years back I noticed a frightening trend, lots of people knew who Nick Cave was (fuckin' duh), but like a single percent of them had heard The Birthday party. I mean, I thought everyone would've known these dudes. Lots of bands reference The Birthday Party as influences, but no one really had a clue. Well fuckin' get one dudes! Shits like rockabilly from hell. Its the darkest, scariest, and some of the most honest music ever created. The Birthday Party where my Joy Division because The Birthday Party wasn't just sad, it was sad and fucking pissed about it.
2 comments:
Disagree with your comments about Joy Division, not sure where your hatred for the band comes from. Birthday Party are just that compared to Joy Division.
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