album // Junkyard
Few album titles can so accurately describe the content as Junkyard so cleverly does, implying a tangled mess of music, filled with all sorts of sonic detritus. It's perversely-beautiful front cover, designed by Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth, evokes the same image, perfectly in tune with the spirit of the music herein.
The junk-punk spirit is most prevalent on tracks such as 'Big Jesus Trash Can', 'Kiss Me Black', 'Hamlet' and 'Blast Off!', at times pushing ahead into a sort of post-jazz improvising session. Though obviously well-rehearsed and well-tested in the live arena, and the loose production seems to prevent the band from becoming too honed, imbuing these tracks with a dishevelled, childish, 'first take' production ethic, almost allowing the band to sound like the aural equivalent of the sleeve's band photos - unkempt, scruffy and raw. The tracks were recorded in Melbourne with Tony Cohen and in London with Richard Mazda, while 'Release The Bats' and 'Blast Off!' were produced by the band and Nick Launey.
The Birthday Party here found a formula and worked it through, literally until the limbs started to fall off. Rowland S Howard's spindly guitar is inventive, working well against Mick Harvey's counter-weighted and controlled lines; Tracy Pew - the iconic, muscular bassist, a sort of Village People meets redneck Texan - lays down superb and gritty low-end anchorage, while Phil Calvert, the wimpy, out-of-place drummer is here ousted on several of the more intense tracks in favour of Harvey's esoteric and adaptable playing. The direction they began to move in on Junkyard was the clear tolling of Calvert's death knell. Nick Cave's vocals are most obviously reminiscent of a squealing, castrated pig allowed to run riot with his feral autistic / artistic, pissed-evangelist wordplay.
'She's Hit' and 'Dead Joe' are perhaps the finest moments here, the former a slow funeral procession-paced affair; the latter, written with Anita Lane, is a brutal putsch of a track simultaneously recalling Mad Max and JG Ballard while doing 150mph along the freeway. Velocity and momentum are central to these tracks, the former like a slinky haphazardly traversing the stairs under its own leisurely steam, the latter an unstoppable engine-driven ride that could only ever fizzle out after two minutes.
When applying some restraint, The Birthday Party proved - on tracks such as 'Several Sins' and '6" Gold Blade' - that they were actually pretty fine musicians, who just happened to enjoy the gleeful abandon that charging headlong into the more ragged tracks allowed. Both tracks feature some fine, physical bass from the late Pew, rumbling along underneath like some out of control U-bahn.
'Junkyard' evokes the murder song spirit that would guide some of Cave's later work, its graphic wordplay describing some grisly sackload of writhing torment, Howard's guitar coming in like waves of reedy feedback behind and above the howling, whining vocals.