extracted from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"
The Birthday Party- Big Jesus Trash Can-Junkyard
I was quite
prepared when this track just came up this morning to spend 500 words and a bit
of time slating The Birthday Party. I listened to it while brewing a pot of
coffee, having a smoke and mulling it all over. I could follow a route of
seeing the Birthday Party as responsible (in part) for the emergence of goth;
all that Old Testament imagery, wailing and gnashing of teeth, big back-combed
matted hair, and tales of depravation, disgust, murder; black clothes and black
imagery. On the other hand I could look at the intrinsic dark humour of The
Birthday Party; how the fact that it is so very much over-the-top; that it’s
really impossible to take it all with any level of seriousness that it’s
actually a comedy record (not in a Barron Knights-style, but you know what I
mean)-it’s so self-consciously dark and bleak that it’s as if they thought so
hard to make it grim and then added (trowelled and heaped) another layer and
more on top because it wasn’t at that level of grimness that they wanted.
It’s basically so much darkness that you
can’t help but laugh at the sheer, unremitting and relentless nature of it all.
I was also thinking about how my British mis-conceptions of Australia have them
down as a lager-drinking, sports-loving nation of people, and how that seems at
odds with the personae of The Birthday Party.
Did they break off recording this
album at any time for a can of Fosters and to sit down to watch some Aussie
Rules? Did their tour schedules have five day breaks so they could make sure
they’d see the Ashes? (It would be quite a good image to see Nick Cave and the
lads wandering around Sydney Cricket Ground, looking suitably dishevelled).
I’ll bet they’re not openly into sports,but that a little bit of them cheers
inside if England loses the Ashes. I suppose that my mis-conceptions of
Australia could in some ironic way, mirror their views of U.S. as Australians
in their mid-twenties when this album was recorded. All Southern Gothic-ness.
There certainly doesn’t seem to me anything specifically Australian about The
Birthday Party, and if I didn’t know that they were from the other side of the
world, then I’m sure I would think that they were from America (or, bearing in
mind their goth-ness, Leeds or Bradford).
I hadn’t
listened to “Junkyard” for a bit and thought that for the purposes of this I
should give it a go. So, with coffee to hand, I expected something that could
lead me into all of the above. I really expected a tinny-sounding 80’s album
that would be easy to scoff at. (After all, it would lead me neatly into
something about post-Birthday Party Nick Cave). However, as I’m sitting here
typing away, I’m pleasantly surprised and even a bit staggered, about what a
powerful and brilliant record it still is. If I disregard all the daft lyrics,
close my mind to all the Goth imagery and just listen to the music; within that
framework of metallic, splintered guitars, Caves’ astonishing vocal range (he’s
quite a good singer), and maelstrom of percussion, there’s something going on
that leads me to unequivocally state that “Junkyard” is, thirty years on, a
classically underrated record.
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