| Why did
I buy the album at all, you might well ask, if I thought it might suck?
I wonder, too. But then I think of a song like “In the Flat Field,”
which I saw Murphy perform with a band of ringers at Fender’s in Long
Beach in 1988 or sometime around then. The muse practically came in through
the AC vents and landed on his shoulders in bodily form. Bauhaus and just
how good they were is a question for another day: certainly they were only
marginally more original than Suede in terms of Bowie-damage, but originality
is nowhere near as important as what new and interesting uses one finds
for the ideas one steals. There was a time, then, when Peter Murphy, first
with Bauhaus and then briefly in his solo career, nicked a trope or two
from his idols and reshaped them into a grand, glorious, dark but complex
thing that displayed both the self-infatuated swagger of youth and the intensity
of focus that one find only in, yes, maturity. I don’t know what happened
to him from “The Line Between The Devil’s Teeth (and that which
cannot be repeat)” until now: one can’t be expected to follow
every talented artist through every nook and cranny of their careers. The
track records of too many established artists suggest that the risk of having
to watch a seasoned vet embarrass himself is greater than the possibility
that he’ll mine new gold in his later years. Yeats saved the best
for last, as did Hardy, but rock singers lack the bitter rigors of poetry. |