In October of 1982, Bauhaus released The Sky's Gone Out. Following on the heels of an EP called Searching For Sartori, the third Bauhaus album seemed, on the surface, a bit disjointed. Was this the beginning of the end? Critics and fans alike seemed to grasp that this was a much different band than the foursome who had created a sub-genre. The Sky's Gone Out starts off with a spirited, rocking cover version of Brian Eno's "Third Uncle," and moves through songs both ominous (the creepy, never-climaxing "Swing The Heartache,") and intensely gloomy ("Spirit"), while never disposing of the trademark band humor ("All We Wanted Was Everything").
Bauhaus could never have been anything other than compelling, no matter what their original intent, such was the talent level of the mates involved. Looking back, there is no question that their third LP was the start of a full-blown willingness to break rules...and to reap the dividends of their brilliant musical experimentation.
By summer of 1983, Bauhaus was a band in flux. Their post-punk peers by this point had moved away from the darker, more claustrophobic sounds of goth. But as their pals and rivals moved into pop realms (as The Cure would), danceable club rhythms (think New Order) or hard-core industrial sounds (Sisters Of Mercy), Bauhaus seemed to typify the experimentalism of the most unclassifiable of rock's groundbreaking bands.
As they recorded their fourth album, singer Peter Murphy fell ill with pneumonia. That illness left the remaining trio in the studio on their own; without Murphy's dark and driving direction, David J, Daniel Ash, and Kevin Haskins now threw everything at the proverbial wall to see what would stick.
It all did.
Presaging their incarnation as Love and Rockets, the Murphy-less trio created a stirring, undeniable collection of songs that found no boundaries in convention of any type. Therefore, when the public got its first listen to Burning from the Inside, the album would showcase a band at its greatest period of introspection, largely minus its front man and daring to forge past all limits. The album includes such gems as the bizarre, chanting "King Volcano," the lounge-worthy piano ballad "Who Killed Mr. Moonlight," and the Ash-sung loveliness of "Slice of Life." But the jaw-dropper on this album is the bouncing reggae of "She's In Parties," which finds Murphy back in the vocal fold. That track, with its endless, echoed groove and wry view of filmmaking, typifies all that Bauhaus was in their last two years: the band that used gothic rock as a stepping stone to a no-holds-barred method of song writing, with no genre off limits - and no genre they couldn't master.
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