Track Listing

1. Third Uncle
2. Silent Hedges
3. In The Night
4. Swing The Heartache
5. Spirit
6. Three Shadows
7. Three Shadows (1)
8. Three Shadows (2)
9. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything
10. Exquisite Corpse

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53896 in Music
• Released on: 2001-06-14
• Number of discs: 1

CD Description
1982's THE SKY'S GONE OUT marks a stylistic midpoint in Bauhaus brief but spectacular career. The group released its first single in 1979 and disbanded in mid-1983. In comparison with their earlier, almost impenetrably convoluted literary references and effectively murky production, this album is lyrically more direct, musically more straightforward, and features vastly cleaner production. The first of these changesis exemplified in the album's second track, "Silent Hedges", with its "Going to hell again" chorus and in the bitter "All we ever wanted was everything, all we ever got was cold" from "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything".
Daniel Ash's guitar work has finally become part of the structure of the songs as opposed to an ornamental splash used for emphasis. The music is less harsh--almost inviting the listener in before the slicing lyrics drop like poised blades. Production-wise, the sound is no longer as cacophonously dense. Such tracks as "Spirit" feature dueling guitars, rumbling drums, and a harpsichord, all clearly separated--at least until the intentional crush of the song's end. The CD appends bonus tracks from several singles, including a reverent treatment of David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust".

Customer Reviews

They don't make them like this anymore
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.

Spirit
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.

Creeping, haunting, thrilling, purple theatre. Yeh.
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.