An older Bauhaus shows traces of its gloomy prime

November 15, 2005|Globe Correspondent

Nearly a quarter of a century after the release of their first single, the four original members of English goth-rock outfit Bauhaus are back.

Again.

Their last reunion was in 1998, and the law of diminishing returns appears to have set in. Bauhaus 2005 is a strange and wistful mixture of echoing glories and cruel age.

Sunday night at the Orpheum Theatre, whose noble decrepitude provided the perfect setting, Bauhaus served up the hits with a gloomy and rather serene lack of vitality. A certain deathly exhaustion was always part of its sound, as the rearing, fluid shapes conjured by guitarist Daniel Ash struggled against the mortal limitations of his rhythm section, but now the drag of experience has become too strong to resist. Faster numbers such as ''In the Flat Field" failed to take off, while the morbid crawl of John Cale's ''Rosegarden Funeral of Sores" (''Virgin Mary was tired . . .") turned out to be one of the set's highlights.

Frontman Peter Murphy, who has at more energetic moments in his career incarnated demons, bats, and lunatics, now seems to have settled for the role of a slightly tubercular-looking aesthete. Thin and bemused, mauve-shirted, with his sparse hair dyed blond and sporting an excellently seedy mustache, Murphy appeared to have wandered onstage out of the green gulfs of an absinthe binge. He licked his lips after every lugubrious phrasing, and barely moved. His cave of a voice is intact, but his dancing shoes are in storage. The leathery disco of ''Kick in the Eye" animated him momentarily -- a tremor in the left leg, nothing more. There was something compelling in seeing so huge a charisma rendered inert.

Of course, Bauhaus was received with raptures by the 30-something, religiously black-clad crowd; the atmosphere created by the band in its heyday reaches easily across the intervening decades. ''The passion of lovers is for death," cried Murphy, and the moody fires of gothic romanticism blazed in a thousand hearts. One forgets how weirdly experimental, how non-goth, the Bauhaus back catalog is: ''In Fear of Fear," driven by blurts of sax and strange clucking sounds . . . the dubbed-out artiness of ''Terror Couple Kill Colonel". . . great stuff, really.

For an encore, Ash, in a furry stovepipe hat, performed a rousing acoustic number of his own called ''Slice of Life" before leading the band into the inevitable misery of ''Bela Lugosi's Dead," Bauhaus's never-to-be-forgotten first single. ''Undead! Undead! Undead!" chanted Murphy sadly, imprisoned in heavy coils of vampire reggae. Plenty of irony here, and plenty of poetry.