A Year of Blind Spots: Mask

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Mask

Bauhaus

1981

What 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die has to say about Mask by Bauhaus:

Bauhaus may be the ultimate goth band, but their second album, Mask, demonstrates that the four-piece British act (comprising of Daniel Ash on guitar, Peter Murphy on vocals, and brothers David J. Haskins on bass and Kevin Haskins on drums) were drawing on a broad range of influences.

The sounds were harder edged than those of Bauhaus' debut, but the introduction of more pop-friendly melodies helped to make Mask digestible for a mainstream audience (it was a UK Top 40 hit), and showed a clear maturation of their sound. The near-primal rhythms of stop-start opener "Hair of the Dog," "Kick in the Eye," and "In Fear of Fear" (which, like "Dancing," features Ash on sax) share a distinctive air of dark theatricality with perhaps the quartet's finest effort, "Of Lillies and Remains," with its darkly humorous spoken-word intro. As a follow-up to their successful debut album In the Flat Field, Mask was a notable step forward, and confirmation that each musician had the potential for artistic longevity (all members continued successful solo careers after Bauhaus' split in 1983, and have become a familiar name on the reunion circuit).

Bauhaus were always defined by a pervasive theatrical starkness, and Mask was no exception—from Daniel Ash's black-and-white cover and the perfect balance of angst and humor in Murphy's eloquent lyrics, to the band's bright-white-lit stage show ("Colored lights are for Christmas trees" they note on their official website). Mask-era Bauhaus never needed the trappings of modern rock. One reason why this album still makes for exhilarating listening today.

What Joe has to say about Mask by Bauhaus:

Am I crazy to say that I didn't hear "goth" on this album at all? "Dark theatricality" is a good phrase, and accurate, but it definitely caught me off-guard, because I wasn't thinking "dark" at all while listening to Mask. I don't know, maybe I'm numb to it. Or maybe post-punk in the 21st century made me way more tolerant to this kind of music. Because this is just straight-up post-punk, right? I mean, I saw "Joy Division + Talking Heads" online already, that's not an original thought, but you can't get better than that. It's like they took the slower, moodier Talking Heads songs, and grafted the skin of one of their funkier rhythms back onto it.

What the hell is goth music, anyway? I take it that it's more of a feeling (and indicative of lyrical content) than a musical descriptor. Something like "Hollow Hills" is goth, but that's absolutely the worst song on the album, so that's probably why I'm so dismissive of the idea of goth music today. I like when Bauhaus focuses on the groove, and allows the "darker" elements—spacey synths or whatever—to invade that space, and not the other way around. "Kick in the Eye," for this reason, is the most exemplary of what Mask has to offer.

Never heard of Bauhaus prior to, and never would have, probably, if 1001 Albums didn't tell me to listen to it before I die. Yet another example of the book being too Anglocentric. But it's not like this was the stated reason for its inclusion in the book. That reason is: goth. But it's weird, because usually, the band is either "proto-" (i.e. helped create the genre) or "post-" (i.e. they took it in new directions), but as far as I can tell, Bauhaus and Mask are both. The band helped form our understanding of "goth music" (though the band denies this claim), and this album took goth in different directions.

It mainly melded gothic rock with post-punk. I don't know if they were the first band to do that, but the book is implying that this is true, so I'm just gonna go with it. If that's the hook here, then that's fine with me. The outcome is desirable. I'm a skeptic of goth rock but I'm pretty deep into the weeds with post-punk, and I'll listen to pretty much anything that's described as part of that genre. Especially when it's considered "theatric." "Theatric post-punk" reads like an oxymoron at first, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that this would be the best of all worlds.

I liked the album. I don't know why this whole thing was about genre. Ah well.