Tonight’s selections from Bauhaus’ third album, 1982’s The Sky’s Gone Out.
The Sky's Gone Out kicks off with a slashing rendition of Brian Eno's "Third Uncle," showing that Bauhaus had deeper roots in the glam pantheon than the group's previous covers—T. Rex's "Telegram Sam" and David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust"—let on. From that relatively neutral starting point, the disc becomes unmistakably Bauhausian. "Silent Hedges" picks up where Mask's "The Passion Of Lovers" left off, only bending acoustic textures toward an even grimmer end, while "In The Night" ploddingly ponders a junkie's downfall—that is, until the song's latter half, when guitarist Daniel Ash, apparently fresh from listening to Judas Priest's Hell Bent For Leather, rips into a suicidal riff of which any denim-clad metalhead would have been proud. Ash's emerging guitar godhood comes into focus again on "Spirit," a darkly psychedelic exploration of fame, stage, and self-mythology with lyrics that Neil Gaiman might have written on an absinthe bender. — AV Club
Third Uncle
By 1982 Bauhaus had already achieved quite a lot of mainstream success, the incredibly diverse début 'In the Flat Field' and equally as distinctive follow-up 'Mask' generating attention from even the biggest media outputs of the world, including horribly harsh reviews from NME and 'Sounds' magazine. And the band hadn't even been together for five years yet. It just goes to show that, whatever you may think of them, their music certainly had an outstandingly powerful effect on everyone (including the burgeoning Gothic Rock and Post-Punk music scenes). However, this success didn't stop the band from experimenting with their sound further. As one can quite clearly grasp from the band's third and fourth records, 'The Sky's gone out' and 'Burning from the inside', the band did not show any signs of giving up at all.
With 'The Sky's gone out', Bauhaus not only succeed in keeping their music at an interesting and unique level, but also manage to express the darkest and most sorrowful emotions in more than just a few musical styles. Thing is, the music isn't even needed to convince people that Bauhaus were an utterly distinctive band. Just look at each of their album covers. 'In the Flat Field' depicts a man (who appears to be) either blowing a percussion instrument or swinging a long, blunt object. 'Mask' looks like it could have been drawn by a toddler. 'The Sky's gone out' seems to be a looming black hole. You get the general idea.
Of course, the music itself on 'The Sky's gone out' is equally as thought-provoking. With a three-part epic, a very well executed cover version of 'Ziggy Stardust', and one track that is basically dominated by dialogue between two people, it seems that, structurally wise at least, Bauhaus' third effort is different to the first two. Right from the very start you can tell that Bauhaus tried to make this as distinctive possible. 'Third Uncle' features a rumbling bass line, congas alongside drums, guitar notes fading in and out, and of course, some very interesting lyrics. As [Peter] Murphy almost chants the repetitive words 'There are...' throughout, everything seems fully focused, fast-paced and frenetically experimental. Of course, this is just one example of the band's overpowering creativity on 'The Sky's gone out'. — Sputnik Music
Silent Hedges
The theme so far with the remastering of this, their third and most popular album (in terms of chart position), is Daniel’s guitar and Kevin [Haskins]’s drums and Swing The Heartache continues in this vein, this one is an incredibly complex piece, often overlooked and rarely touched in the live environment. Making full use of the homemade clap-trap trigger on his drum, Kevin is seriously beginning to experiment here, with incredible results. The listener is enticed by an eerie atmospheric intro that suddenly blasted to pieces by an onslaught of Kevin’s precise machine gun bullets, the wasp synthesiser used so effectively on Of Lilies And Remains (from Mask) makes a welcome return, once clambering to be heard here amongst the swathes of treated guitar is now unmistakably audible. Swing The Heartache is, without doubt, the albums new highlight. [...]
The serenity of Peter Murphy’s naïve guitar is a welcome mood change from the feverish onslaught of side one. Often thought of as a full instrumental, The Three Shadows (Part one) now reveals clearly that there are actually ribbons of backing vocals stitched into it. Its more intricate elder sibling the second part of this trilogy also reveals many hidden attributes, concealed amongst Peter’s remarkable vocal delivery is a complex piano backbone that now reveals itself in shiny new colours, giving the song a whole new resonance. But its perhaps part three that really comes to the fore in this new edition of The Sky’s Gone Out, bringing out some lustrous backing vocals that were very much lost in its first outing, another highlight of this record.
The gorgeous All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, is unassumingly stunning in its simplicity. Basic guitar strumming from Peter leads the way for Daniel to drip feed his trademark atmosphere into it. Much like The Three Shadows (part three) this one also reveals some previously unheard backing vocals provided by Daniel Ash. — Louder Than War
Ziggy Stardust
The tender “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything” is gorgeous, despite – or maybe because of – its subject about the banality of growing up in Northampton, a town in the East Midlands of England. The final cut, “Exquisite Corpse,” is experimental in the truest sense of the word. Think of something and it’s in there; spoken word, a cappella, howling, fuzzed out guitar, distorted bass, reggae, coughing, snoring. The song toes the line of being both unlistenable and fascinating in its strangeness.
“What I liked about that album is that we put some really non-songs on it, which were so sort of open,” Murphy would say years later.
At the time of its release, The Sky’s Gone Out was skewered by the British music press, and in the U.S., where it was the first Bauhaus release not to be an import; many people weren’t sure what to make of it. Fittingly then, it would signal the end of the group.
Murphy was felled by pneumonia as the year drew to a close, recording of the next album was handled mainly by Ash and bassist David J, who would trade off on vocals on some tracks. Along with drummer Kevin Haskins, the trio would eventually go off to form Love and Rockets while Murphy struck out solo, as Bauhaus broke up before the fourth album even came out. — Diffuser.fm
Swing The Heartache
What made Bauhaus distinctive, and nearly as influential as their namesake, was their musical commitment to darkness as an overriding principle. Other bands were deploying dissonance, or harnessing chaos, in service of foreboding atmospheres – Suicide, Magazine, the up-and-coming Joy Division. But Bauhaus’s commitment was to the bleakest possible objectives, typified by a sequence of four album covers with barely any color between them, and lyrics you’re grateful Peter Murphy doesn’t let you understand. They meant to let no light in, and it went hand-in-glove with the strange and sometimes vicious chemistry between their three musicians, who diligently stripped away melody wherever it intruded or, God forbid, brightened something. (No light doesn’t mean no space, of course – their music left caverns for ghosts to wander into.)
Post-punk was inevitable and necessary, but bucking punk’s rigid formal guidelines (hard, fast, simple) was risky – you could end up too soft, too slow, or too complicated, where punk was always at least an up. This was not a lesson Bauhaus neglected. Even the spacious graveyard groove of their dub-drunk debut single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was insistent enough to dance to. Peter Murphy’s regulated bellow both reified and made fun of the lyrics’ “gothic” slant, with Daniel Ash the real threat – his metallic, amelodic guitar slashing madly and unpredictably through spaces in the mix, only to vanish abruptly the next moment. Bassist David J repeated the same riff with disquieting authority, three notes like sinking concrete blocks. His brother, drummer Kevin Haskins, blithely perpetuated the gentlest of bossa nova grooves. In tandem, they understood: the key to the scariest horror movies is the stillness the danger disturbs. — Rock And Roll Globe
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything
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