Artist: The Birthday PartyAlbum: Junkyard
Year: 1982
In stark contrast to Midnight Oil and the Triffids, the Birthday Party weren’t interested in arena-ready guitars and songs about the glorious openness of Australia. Instead, they chose a path defined by the most brutal guitar squall you’ve ever heard and lyrics about Hamlet driving Cadillacs. Apparently, down south in Melbourne, things get a bit wonky. Formed in the mid-70s by a group of grammar school boys led by singer Nick Cave, the onset of punk served as a catalyst, motivating them to start a band and play this awesome youthful music they were hearing. Starting as the Boys Next Door, they trafficked in a sort of overly dramatic New Wave pop before guitarist Rowland S. Howard showed up and showed them a whole new way to do things. Howard’s style was a unique, violent flurry of shearing noise and notes, which resonated with Cave particularly, appealing to his more avant-guard artistic sensibilities. By 1980, they had changed their name to the Birthday Party and were making some of the most unchained, crazy music around. Junkyard, their second and final album, perfectly showcases the aggressive lurching and slobbering the band became famous for. Cave’s lyrics match the violent music, full of swinging hatchets, car smashes, “crusty cutlasses” and so on. The title track is particularly primal, driven by a solid baseline from cowboy/bassist Tracy Pew, allowing Howard to throw out metallic shards of noise while Cave howled and growled over it all. The Birthday Party wouldn’t make it past 1983, but their music was immediately embraced by the growing post-punk community, eventually becoming one of the major pillars of the goth-rock canon.
Artist: Foetus
Album: Nail
Year: 1985
There’s no good way to pin down the music of J. G. Thirlwell, another troubled Melbourne lad, who records, tastefully, under a variety of names, all including the word “foetus”. Foetus Under Glass, Foetus Over Frisco, Foetus All-Nude Revue, Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel…and my personal favorite, You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath. Clearly not one to avoid controversy, Thirlwell was quickly accepted by the experimental No Wave music scene in New York. He released a serious of albums throughout the mid-80s, culminating in 1985’s Nail, under the Scraping Foetus moniker. Loosely connected with the emerging industrial music scene, Nail’s songs defy just about any logic you try to apply to them. “The Throne Of Agony” starts as a chunk of ironic gothic nonsense (“a roll of the dice; the woim toins”…? Huh?) before everything starts breaking down. Chunks of the Mission Impossible theme zoom every which way, Thirlwell starts paraphrasing Shakespeare (“alas, poor Yorick…I knew me well”) and rhymes “agony” with “tracheotomy”. Two tracks, “Theme From Pigdom Come” and “Overture From Pigdom Come”, are full-on, symphonic compositions, recorded entirely on synthesizers. “Enter The Exterminator” is interrupted halfway through with two bars of Grieg’s “In The Hall Of The Mountain King”. Does any of this make sense to you? The insanity hits the highest of high notes on the appropriately named “Descent Into The Inferno”, a runaway train of a track that evolves from gravel-voiced ballad into a hyperactive industrial shitstorm, with do-wop choruses flying by as the tempo keeps getting faster and faster, in some wonderful/terrifying world where “halleluiah” rhymes with “stomach tumor”. As his name suggests, Foetus’s music isn’t for the faint of heart or mind. However, whether you like his music or not, Thirlwell has proven to be one of the most original and, oddly, hilarious musicians around.
Two of my favorite artists in one post. I believe you've outdone yourself.
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