Songs of wraiths and devotion
Bela Lugosi and Bauhaus may be dead — the latter perhaps for good — but Peter Murphy vamps on
By David Cotner 06/19/2008
Peter Murphy
June 6
Ventura Theater
Just as one sure way to learn about alcohol is to order the booze at the bar that no one wants, the best way to learn about a band is by the way its members pursue their various solo projects. And yes, for every Ringo Starr there’s a Jimmy Messina — or, alternately, for every Bobby Beausoleil there’s a Manson Family. And yet, it is the most compelling of all pop acts that compel an audience to follow through the changes. Those Peter Frampton millions you see cheering in the archival footage — where are they all now? All those millions of LP records — where have they gone? Constancy is the most volatile element in the alchemy of pop music; goosebumps have it in their nature to eventually fade. They say that sound stretches outward into infinity when struck, and yet there are practical problems with that proposition, pop-wise — although I’m sure A&R would love to get a piece of that.
“Burning from the Inside” by Bauhaus kicks off the set; an apt and apropos choice to open the evening. Murphy has always been in love with a large and forceful drum sound, and tonight is no exception. His more recent, devotional Sufi-inflected output, culled from the sensibilities of his home in Ankara, Turkey, meshes well with the wider rubric of pop music. Murphy’s voice has a rather impressive quality in its cool and coiled power — there is a startling newness when he chooses to unleash its more strident keen and bellow, at time even rivaling the intimidating shout of Conrad Bain. “Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem,” a lush and affecting acoustic ballad, becomes a testament to that curious pop magic that transforms a song that is outwardly such an arch-bummer into something with great and bottomless meaning, to which the listener cleaves so ardently and of which he or she is fond forever after.
“I’ll Fall with Your Knife,” in all its anthemic emotionalism, is emblematic of Murphy’s solo work, which essentially deals with interpersonal devotion, something that makes the derangement and detachment of prime Bauhaus that much more nuanced and jarring in retrospect. “The Sweetest Drop,” another of his hits, hits home the fact that the absence or reduction of bombast is, in pop music, what high-definition TV is to the sitcom: It tends to reveal things as they really are. It is not for nothing that great walls — both of sound, and in China — come off as ever-so-slightly alienating. And so sonically it does him a great disservice when, during one of his more earnest songs — “Idle Flow,” for instance — the bass is turned up to near-SunnO))) levels, such that the point of having lyrics is fairly sandblasted into pointlessness. Like Ol’ Blue Eyes said on “The Sinatra Report,” “It’s all pops and buzzes from here.”
At the encore, he does “Strange Kind of Love” and the Bauhaus single “She’s in Parties.” And, yes, he does “Cuts You Up,” too. Not a dry seat in the house.
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