Review: The Gilded Palace Of Sin - You Break Our Hearts, We'll Rip Yours Out

The Gilded Palace Of Sin - You Break Our Hearts, We'll Rip Yours Out
2010, Central Control

There is music and there is art. The Venn diagram between the two varies from band to band and from album to album. Periodically an album will come along that will bring those circles completely together, even for but a moment. On their debut album, You Break Our Hearts, We'll Rip Yours Out, England's The Gilded Palace Of Sin dances through transcendent moments to create one of the most satisfying Rock-noir albums of the new year. You Break Our Hearts, We'll Rip Yours Out is offered up By Barry Adamson's (Magazine, Bad Seeds) Central Control label.

The Gilded Palace Of Sin opens with the ambient electro-rock of For When We Forget, a haunting and beautiful peace that suggests itself in much the same fashion that an opening movement to a film score will do. Rosa Salvaje explores longing and loss in human terms full both of pain and dark hope. Mean Old Jack is a classic story song along the lines of Bad Leroy Brown. The arrangement here is a simple Blues/Rock workup, but vocalist Pete Plythian keeps it interesting with a dynamic and memorable performance. The song runs a bit long, clocking in at over eight minutes, but the pacing and performance with distract you from this outcome, even as entropy follows a Theremin over the edge in the final minute and a half of the song.

Rubbing Up is a paean to dogged determination set against a dark and dreary musical landscape full of sense of unrealized hopelessness. The static nature of the melody is a bit trying, but the musical construction around it is worthwhile. There Is No Evil There Is No Good develops from chaos into a loosely structured treatise on pragmatic humanism. The broken clock sounds of the back of the refrain suggest a cracked worldview approximating the suspension of perspective suggested by a funhouse mirror. Bones Of The Saints is a disturbing tale of intentions that are far out of line with the peaceful, ethereal arrangement. Acts that give pause are stated, even invited with the simple clarity that accompanies either the utter loss of hope or insanity.

On Wedding Rice, The Gilded Palace Of Sin gives a recitation of life events of the song's invisible subject; the effect would work if a coherent story arose from the one-sided conversation, but what is offered here is either to explicit or too allegorical to connect with listeners. Nautilus represents a transition (albeit) to an electronic style that's vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Dolby. The air of hopeless expectation that envelopes the album seems to flow from this song; a memorial to all that's gone wrong and all that's yet to. The Gilded Palace Of Sin closes out with Home Because You're Here, a post-modern love song with apocryphal overtones and a single shaft of hope growing out of the dark morass of emotions swirling about You Break Our Hearts, We'll Rip Yours Out.

All and all, You Break Our Hearts, We'll Rip Yours Out is a solid musical experience that walks right up to the edge of chaos and invites it in in small measures. The result is bleak rock with a creative streak that will exasperate and surprise you. The Gilded Palace Of Sin will push you to the brink of frustration, only to snap you back like a musical yo-yo into their hands; all through the scope of a worldview that would cheer up Robert Smith.

Rating: 3.5 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about The Gilded Palace Of Sin at www.myspace.com/thegildedpalaceofsin or http://www.centralcontrol.co.uk/. You can purchase You Break Our Hearts, We'll Rip Yours Out as either a CD or Download from Amazon.com.

Book Review: Nick Cave - The Death Of Bunny Munro

Nick Cave - The Death Of Bunny Munro
2009, Faber & Faber

Nick Cave has been singer, songwriter and spiritual leader for The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman; one wonders why he would even feel the need to write novels. It turns out he's actually pretty good at it. His first book, And The Ass Saw An Angel, debuted in 1989 to rave critical reviews. The Australian-born resident of Brighton returns 20 years later with his sophomore effort, The Death Of Bunny Munro. Bunny Munro is a post-modern Willie Loman with the self-destructive tendencies of Holden Caufield and the hubris of Charlie Harper (Charlie Sheen, Two and a Half Men).

We meet Munro in the midst of his life's work, ripping innocence and self-respect from the female beauty product-buying populace of England with his magnetic eyes and arrogant swagger. Munro goes through ladies trousers like a pig through slop. Munro, however, is on the precipice of a stunning fall from grace. His wife clinically depressed and tired of Bunny’s Philandering, commits suicide in gruesomely deliberate fashion, making it very clear in the process why. Bunny instantly becomes primary caretaker of his son, Bunny Jr., and the great swoon is on. Bunny Munro has always had a predilection for drugs and alcohol, but his consumption increases in direct proportion to the decline of Munro’s judgment and control. He begins to lose his savoir-faire with the ladies and his place in the world. To further it all, it becomes readily apparent that Munro is so immersed himself that he is utterly incapable of taking care of Bunny Jr.

Bunny takes his son on the road to show him the ropes of selling, which for Bunny Jr. amounts to sitting in the family car and waiting for Dad to score and then score. This works well for Bunny until his dead wife starts dropping in on his extra-curricular sessions, as well as showing herself and then visiting Bunny Jr. Hanging over all of this is Bunny’s Dad, ill with terminal cancer and as mean as a junk yard dog on a hunger strike. If you’ve followed all of this thus far, you’ll understand that The Death of Bunny Munro is a mess; A glorious, hilarious mess. Nick Cave has constructed a character so cartoonish he has to be real, and his story-telling style is more like he’s telling you over a beer than writing it down for you to read later.

In the end Munro is a character you hate to like, but there’s a simpering humanity to the man that catches your sympathy. You realize that Munro is, more than anything else, a product of his upbringing. The cancer that is killing his old man isn’t nearly as powerful as the social one he passed on to this son. Bunny Jr. there’s still hope for, and perhaps that is the reason for all of this to occur. Either way, The Death Of Bunny Munro an entertaining story that won’t play well on the Oprah book list but would probably make a wonderful short miniseries for HBO or Cinemax. Nick Cave scores again!

Rating: 4 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Nick Cave and The Death of Bunny Munro at http://www.thedeathofbunnymunro.com/ or http://www.nick-cave.com/. You can purchase The Death Of Bunny Munro from Amazon.com as a hardcover, an audiobook CD read by Cave or as an audio download.