The Birthday Party
Prayers on Fire
Album · Alternative · 1981 · 4AD
Transplanting from Australia to London, the Birthday Party were surprised to find themselves nearly alone in their assault on traditional rock n‘ roll values. The post-punk movement they looked to join was already splintering into various subgenres of synth-pop and Goth with few true innovators among them. The Birthday Party, in turn, grew more challenging with each new release. As The Boys Next Door they’d recorded a fairly conventional album, but their Birthday Party debut, 1981’s Prayers on Fire, started with the funk-punk rumble of “Zoo Music Girl” and continued with songs that touched on evil yet divine spiritual retribution and a sadomasochistic streak that made their music singular. Singer-lyricist Nick Cave channels Leonard Cohen through a fixation with French poetry and an emerging interest in American Gothic tradition along the lines of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. But for all the band’s high art connotations, they mined sound as an exploratory wound bandaged in the gutter, as the squalid yelps of “Yard” and “Cry,” the alliterative wordplay of “Capers,” and the sleazy kick of “Nick the Stripper” bear witness. Yet, they got weirder with their second album Junkyard.
Prayers on Fire
The Birthday Party
Transplanting from Australia to London, the Birthday Party were surprised to find themselves nearly alone in their assault on traditional rock n‘ roll values. The post-punk movement they looked to join was already splintering into various subgenres of synth-pop and Goth with few true innovators among them. The Birthday Party, in turn, grew more challenging with each new release. As The Boys Next Door they’d recorded a fairly conventional album, but their Birthday Party debut, 1981’s Prayers on Fire, started with the funk-punk rumble of “Zoo Music Girl” and continued with songs that touched on evil yet divine spiritual retribution and a sadomasochistic streak that made their music singular. Singer-lyricist Nick Cave channels Leonard Cohen through a fixation with French poetry and an emerging interest in American Gothic tradition along the lines of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. But for all the band’s high art connotations, they mined sound as an exploratory wound bandaged in the gutter, as the squalid yelps of “Yard” and “Cry,” the alliterative wordplay of “Capers,” and the sleazy kick of “Nick the Stripper” bear witness. Yet, they got weirder with their second album Junkyard.
