Search - Birthday Party :: Junkyard

I am the King

Jonathan Dedward | Nowheresville, Slothwestern North America | 06/04/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Birthday Party were an angry, spiteful band. After recording bluesy, experimental punkish dirges on their first album, they birthed Junkyard into the world. As important as it is, Junkyard is a hard album to really like. As stated before, the production values are non-existent. Junkyard is a nightmare... not in some elegant Gothic way, but in a very Lo Fi anti-music, piss-off the fans kind of way.



For one thing, throughout Junkyard the guitars sound all wrong. Very often in editorial reviews hard guitar riffs are described as "metallic" and sometimes critics wax poetic, describing a particularly punishing guitar as being "strung with barbed wire." Here, however, the guitar sound is so tinny and metallic and pitched so high that those cliched descriptions actually apply... it's a horrid squealing sound, especially on songs like Hamlet(Pow Pow Pow) where the guitars actually blend with brass horns. Disconcerting is the only way to describe it. Nick Cave's powerful voice, the focal point of the band, is a mostly yammering, roaring, snarling, brainless mess. The lyrics, (example: "yack..yack...yackyackyack yack goes junkface") are rambing, drug addled nonsense. Nonsense! There is scarcely a hint of melody to be found anywhere on the album. The songs rhythms are unconventional. You like music catchy? Move aside, grandma.



The only thing, and I mean ONLY thing grounding these "songs" is the bass, played by the incredible gyrating showman Tracy Pew. If you pay attention to the low end, the rumbling bass provides the arresting appeal of songs like the title track... especially its cataclysmic ending. Songs like "She's hit" "Blast off!" and "Dead Joe" rumble powerfully, but I have to admit, none of them are particularly appealing in any musical sense. "Release the Bats," perhaps the band's most famous single, as well as the best produced track on the cd release, was a song the band conceived of as a humorous send up of the Goths that seemed to follow them.



So why do I like this? This album is startlingly original. It's offensive, confrontational and mean. The songs vaguely describe drug addiction, murder and depravity in poetic, open and creative ways. For the right kind of listener, this is downright inspiring. This isn't some talentless band hacking together "shocking" music for attention, this is a highly disciplined, literate band (try listening to a 17 year old Nick Cave singing "Shivers" and then tell me these guys can't play classically) composing trashy punk that radiates contempt for their own peers, audience, and genre... it's a band being themselves, destroying everything and yet remaining musicians. I enjoy this record, and I return to it again and again, because it somehow just feels right, somehow. As ugly and inaccessible as it is, it makes me proud of them. Nick Cave and Tracy Pew, Rolland Howard and Mick Harvey have carved their legacy into the music of today. This fact is not debatable. The Birthday Party broke up soon after I was born, and yet bands as recent as The Horrors (these old-school guys are younger than I am!) reflect their influence. I admire the hell out of the Birthday Party. Their music is brutal, vicious and uncompromising. I can't defend their stuff very well to those who don't get it, but man... I love it."