Bauhaus

BAUHAUS: GLOAMING THE STAR WALKBauhaus slid fully formed from punk rock's womb in late 1978. Over the course of four hot years, they unintentionally birthed a genre (Goth), moved on, moved forward, and surged mercurial through the post-punk music scene, tearing into tense, bass-driven new-wave, T-Rex-esque dark-glam, and swirling, clattering, orchestral atmospherics, whilst churning it into a grand, velvet, Rimbaudian hallucination. To pin the band to one genre is nothing but reductive. Their influences run deep, encompassing everything from dub reggae to proto-electronic bands like Can and Suicide. As the NME says, "Bauhaus are to Goth, what Radiohead are to Prog."It's all building blocks; you see it when they play live. It comes to you in sudden illuminations! You realize that The Faint, The Killers and Moving Units got their twisted, sexclub beats from Bauhaus. That the sensual 'disco punk' darkness The Rapture milk, was unpasteurized dairy to Bauhaus 20 years ago and second-nature at that. Seeing Bauhaus live brings it all back home. How-without them-there wouldn't be a Nine Inch Nails or a Jane's Addiction or a Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, AFI, Interpol, Hot Hot Heat. Sui generis.The accomplishments of singer Peter Murphy, bassist David J, guitarist Daniel Ash and drummer Kevin Haskins are too many to list here. But to touch lightly, there are the four studio albums-In the Flat Field (1980), Mask (1981), The Sky's Gone Out (1982), and Burning from the Inside (1983)-which merged icy detachment with impassioned artistic violence. There's the rivetting appearance with David Bowie in The Hunger, this at the Thin White Duke's royal request. There are the classic Peel sessions. Live recordings. And hits, seismic rumbles, crushing hymns like "She's in Parties," "Kick in the Eye," "Stigmata Martyr" and the great, epic, pillar of ether and brooding, stark psychedelia, "Bela Lugosi's Dead." Like Iggy Pop sang, it was "soul radiation in the dead of night, love in the middle of a firefight." And it still is.Bauhaus' 1998 'Resurrection' world tour was a smashing success but only foretold of that which was to come: This year's full-scale reunion, kicking off with a hush-hush, pre-Coachella secret show in LA, where the band took the stage and played savage like they'd never left-still full of fire and heart and poise, before disappearing back into the wings like the phantoms of the teenage opera they were once dubbed by the press and then the already legendary, spot-light stealing performance at the big festival in the dessert.Funky but dangerous, doomy but not without a certain Goddardian sense of humor, it is a sound dead-set relevant to life today. As the guns of war rattle, and society falls back to 1980s conservatism, as hands in the darkness reach out for a guiding star, Bauhaus has returned to claim what's theirs... the world, you, your heart, everything. Darkness doubles. The light pours in...Adam Gnade