Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
They don't make them like this anymore, 10 April 2001
Bauhaus at their most self-indulgent, surreal and pretentious. But you've got to love 'em for it! The album opens with the energetic, but the weakest track, "Third Uncle" a cover version of a Brian Eno song. They couldn't resist the literary and artistic references and the spooky "Silent Hedges" paraphrases whole chunks of Huxley's "Brave New World". "In The Night" is a reprise of a 1979 song and is the ugliest song they have ever come up with, yet it's infused with punk energy and no one shrieks better than Peter Murphy (not even Bowie!). "Swing The Heartache" are Murphy's vocals in their soaring magnificence. "Spirit" differs from the single version; a song about how the spirit present when Bauhaus performed allowed them to transcend into greatness. Now for side two, this is where things get really interesting. "The Three Shadows" parts 1-3 are truly haunting and gothic. In part one an atmospheric riff is played over and over, slowly being added to after each turn. Parts two and especially three again allow Murphy to express his vocal talents as he berates the listener in an existential piece about choices and situations. Very Jean-Paul Sartre! "All We Ever Wanted" an acoustic lament about how Bauhaus only want "to be the cream", which leads us into "Exquisite Corpse" one of the band's experimental pieces. You'll either love it or hate it. Cadavre exquis was favourite pastime of surrealists who constructed literary pieces by writing a line and giving it to the next person who wrote a line without seeing what the preceding line was. Bauhaus adapted this to produce a musical piece, just as Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro and Max Morise created paintings by the same method. With five segments, it commences with a mantra. The next four segments are little gems of backwards guitar and loops, slabs of noise and shrieking, and what can only be described as "goth-reggae". A wonderful close to a weird and wonderful album.
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10 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Spirit, 20 Dec 2001
By A Customer
Bauhaus is really one of the most amazing bands ever. Their first song, "Bela Lugosi's Dead," was a monster hit from the first time it was ever played publicly in Britain. They have influenced literally millions of people with their music and style. The Sky's Gone Out contains some of their best material and reveals their own influences. Their cover of "Ziggy Stardust" exhibits their admiration of Bowie, and, dare I say, surpasses their idol's rendition in terms of energetic interpretation. "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" exemplifies a romantic yearning for a youthful and narcissistic life without boundaries, a theme as common in postpunk as the existentialism and Dadaism referenced in "The Three Shadows. "Spirit" is a glorious masterpiece of gothic form: "The stage becomes a ship in flames, I tie you to the mast; throw your body overboard, the spotlight doesn't last, the spotlight doesn't last." The song captures the Dionysian mystery at the heart of performance, the transubstantiation of ephemeral human art into eternal divine creativity. The stage is the altar where the godhead of human potential becomes manifest. Bauhaus convey that mystic transformation better than any other artistic entity I have ever encountered.
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3 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Creeping, haunting, thrilling, purple theatre. Yeh., 1 Jan 2000
With a transcendental aesthetic unlike anything heard before or since, The Sky's Gone Out has a shiny, unfiltered, twisted blackness, purposeful yet mysterious, ugly yet beautiful, meancing yet theatrical. Have your tickets ready.
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