| But there
is no discipline that doesn’t adore an exception, and so it is with
great pleasure that I present to you this new Peter Murphy album. Holy cow,
people, this is great stuff. To enjoy Peter Murphy you have to accept a
few propositions from the get-go: 1. It’s OK to consider Diamond Dogs-era Bowie the ultimate model for rock vocals. 2. Just because a person uses middle eastern, Javanese, or aboriginal Australian instruments on his rock record, that doesn’t make him Peter freaking Gabriel. 3. Or Paul freaking Simon, either. 4. A sense of humor, while often a nice quality, is not crucial to an album’s success. This last one is key, because while I’m certain that the man himself has a great sense of humor, his records never have. I suspect that this may have had something to do with the breakup of Bauhaus: Love & Rockets were celebratedly, perhaps notoriously whimsical. (It’s been so long since I heard Tones On Tail that I’m hesitant to say much about them beyond their excellence for dancing.) Peter Murphy, on the other hand, chases visions of distressed ecstasy: songs in blissfully rich minor keys, melodies that stretch from minor third to minor sixth in deliriously rising agonies, pillaged Turkish rhythms that do everything they can to conjure the foreboding, terrifying mood of the opening scenes from William Friedkin’s The Exorcist: the scenes that take place in Egypt or Iraq or Iran, Max von Sydow moving slowly through the archaeological digs and the crowded markets, visions of fighting wild dogs and demons older than the world appearing to him in the heat like creatures from his dreams come to life. |
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