Album Review: Go Away White by Bauhaus

It's perhaps appropriate that Bauhaus' first new studio album in 25 years is also, apparently and finally, the last. After following their 1998 reunion tour with a second in 2005 and after that eventually led to the band debuting a full range of new songs on the road, the signs for a possible new future seemed strong, but in a weird echo of the past the quartet once again disbanded before an album release. However, perhaps the best and most surprising thing about Go Away White is that it doesn't resemble Burning from the Inside or any other Bauhaus album -- rather than trying to recapture the past, the four members sought to meet in the middle where they had ended up, at least in part.

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When U.K. Goth-punk pioneers Bauhaus were exhumed again to perform at the Coachella music festival in ’05, they raised fans’ hopes for a new studio album that would resurrect the humid grooves and soured romance of the band’s early-’80s heyday. Go Away White doesn’t quite make good on that potential; the guitar fuzz is too restrained, while Peter Murphy’s vocals evoke David Bowie doing funny grandpa voices.

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Go Away White was recorded in a California studio in 18 days, which is less a testament to the re-reunited proto-goths’ creative spontaneity than it is to the maximum time they could stand being in the same room. According to drummer Kevin Haskins, there was an “incident,” and Bauhaus are now deader (again) than Bela Lugosi. Sadly, this is a posthumous offering that sounds half-finished and, considering they must have known this would be their final statement, like a missed opportunity.

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