Tuesday

CULT RECORD: BIRTHDAY PARTY: " PRAYERS ON FIRE " (1981)

Emerging, like some hideous butterfly, from the Bowie-damaged new wave chrysalis of the Boys Next Door, the Birthday Party were the most abandoned, sensorily-deranged Dionysian rock'n'rollers since the Stooges. But although Nick Cave's self-confesed urtex was Funhouse, his grandiose delivery and baroque lyrics were actually closer to Iggy's own model, Jim Morrison.  Like Jimbo, Cave had literary ambitions that eventually blossomed in his Southern-Gothic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. Abjection-- the base materiality of fleshy existence-- figures vividly in Cave's lyrics for Prayers on Fire and  Junkyard, as a source of both voluptuous allure and skin-crawling revulsion. On Prayers, Tracy Pew's scabrous bass is the obscenely throbbing heart of the band's itchy, twitchy music of disequilibrium and malaise; he provides both motor and melody in the lust-stricken baccahanal "Zoo-Music Girl", the Artaud-meets-Screamin'-Jay-Hawkins paroxysms of "A Dead Song," and the spasming swamp-funk of "King Ink"

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