Music Review: Peter Murphy, Should The World Fail To Fall Apart (reissued, remastered, expanded)

Published on April 18th, 2014 in: Music, Music Reviews, Retrovirus, Reviews |

By Jeffery X Martin

peter-murphy-should-the-world-review-header-graphic

It’s 1986 and for many, Goth is dead. Suck on that irony for a moment.

Bauhaus has disbanded and Peter Murphy is looking for a new musical direction, but one that won’t alienate his core fanbase. It’s a difficult task, and song choice is of the highest importance. The result is a strange little album called Should the World Fail to Fall Apart, a mixed bag of brave decisions, not all of which work.

It being 1986, the songs lean towards being keyboard heavy and saturated with reverb. This dates the production, but doesn’t necessarily pigeonhole the songs. The leadoff song, “Canvas Beauty,” is lushly orchestrated and reminiscent of Bauhaus’s “All We Ever Wanted,” with its fretless bass and acoustic guitar. It’s also about 90 seconds too long and encumbered with tinkling synths that distract from the tune itself.

It’s indicative of this record’s place, but if you’re going to fail, fail big, and take some risks while you’re doing it.

A majority of the record seems utterly schizophrenic. We can almost feel Murphy pulling away from his Gothic past in some areas, like on the title track, with its jaunty riff borrowed from both Beethoven and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message.” Other times, like on the so-Goth-it-hurts “Never Man,” you can almost hear the producers yelling, “No, Pete! More scary! Roll your eyes back in your head!” It isn’t until the disc is almost over that the perfect balance is achieved. “Blue Heart” combines the expected condemnation with the Rhythm Nation, becoming the perfect song for self-flagellation.

Oddly, the most successful songs on the album are cover tunes. Murphy was certainly no stranger to the re-do, having covered “Ziggy Stardust” so well with Bauhaus that even David Bowie said he liked their version better than his own. It’s in his reconstruction of Magazine’s “The Light Pours Out of Me” that we get the first sense of a fight. We get the soaring vocals, that sense of velvet cape stranger danger, the notion that Murphy isn’t going to be happy with mediocrity from his new life as a solo act.

His cover of Pere Ubu’s “Final Solution” may be the definitive one, a song filled with manic guitars and snarling vocals from Murphy, all leading to a screaming, shouting chorus. He is the perfect deliverer of that song’s smirking snark, and he hammers the final choral catharsis like a man in full cognizance and straight-up defiance of his own questionable marketability.

The Cherry Red two-disc set of Should the World Fail to Fall Apart is flawless. The second disc does have the requisite Cherry Red remixes that all of their reissues seem to have, but there are also alternate versions of songs, some of which, like the fast version of “Canvas Romance,” are superior to the album version. Fans of “Final Solution” will be pleased to see three different takes of the song, each different enough to warrant repeated listens. I’ve reviewed a few things from Cherry Red before, and this one is my favorite so far.

That’s funny, because the album isn’t that great. Murphy didn’t really hit his stride until his third album, Deep, which was the finest blend of old and new Pete, satisfying both the Bauhaus fans and the folks who liked his solo work better (yes, there are people like that).

I owned this album when it came it 1986. I like it better now than I did then. It’s been on repeat rotation for about the last week for me. When the songs come on that don’t impress me, I tune out. But when the awesomeness kicks in, I turn this record up, pretend I’m wafer-thin, and rock out with my Goth out.

Should the World Fail to Fall Apart may not totally hold together, but for the curious and the completist, the Cherry Red reissue is more than worth picking up.

Should the World Fail to Fall Apart was released by Cherry Red Records on February 2.

3 Responses to “Music Review: Peter Murphy, Should The World Fail To Fall Apart (reissued, remastered, expanded)”


  1. morgana:
    April 22nd, 2014 at 4:58 pm

    I realize as I read your reviews, I may have been listening to music wrong my entire life. With the exception of a few tapes/cds, there’s alot that has been just a song here and there from whoever. It occurs to me that an album like this might actually require listening to the whole shebang regardless of how good or bad it is, just for the benefit of the full experience.
    It may also be a good time to play Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, follow it with Bauhaus’s and compare the two. For an artist like Bowie (and he really IS an artist in my book) to say he likes someone else’s version better than his own, that really says alot to me.
    Sidenote: I’m really not sure what the cause is, but for some reason throughout the reading of this article “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was on repeat in my head. I blame you.

  2. Ducky Fuckerson:
    June 7th, 2017 at 3:43 am

    Great review. As a Peter Murphy apologist, I will readily admit that this album was absolutely all over the map; still love it, especially the LP photo of Mr. Murphy wearing pastels(!)
    And FYI, the title of the song is “Canvas Beauty”, not “Canvas Romance”.

  3. Popshifter:
    June 7th, 2017 at 11:11 am

    Thanks for reading! I think the confusion in that song title is because there’s a remix called “Canvas Beauty (Romance Version).” We’ve fixed the error.

    LLM







Time limit is exhausted. Please reload the CAPTCHA.