Virgin Prunes - A New Form Of Beauty (pts 1-4)

"Virgin Prunes" is not a form of beauty review; it is the name of a pioneering Irish post-punk band, and "A New Form of Beauty" is one of their multi-part musical projects from 1981, recently reissued in a deluxe edition. The project was an avant-garde work combining industrial, post-punk, and darkwave elements, with tracks like "Come to Daddy" exploring dark themes of domestic violence through experimental sound.

A New Form of Beauty, Pts. 1-4 Review by Thom Jurek

New Form of Beauty stands as one of most audacious projects in pop history, even if the mainstream of popular culture has no idea who the Virgin Prunes are, or that it existed in the first place. New Form of Beauty, Pts. 1-4 represents early, pre-debut-LP offerings from Ireland's Virgin Prunes, a band that grew up alongside U2 -- in fact, vocalist Gavin Friday would often finish sets for Bono when he couldn't go the distance. The project was conceived in seven original parts, only four were ever released. New Form of Beauty captures very closely the controlled and often anarchic art damage that the band was doing in a live setting early on. Industrial sounds wrapped around more conventional guitar, bass, drum, and keyboard trappings, singers Gavin Friday and Guggi were both outrageously androgynous, utterly captivating frontmen. Collected here, via Mute, in wonderfully remastered CD form, are the original 7", 10" and 12" singles and the full-length cassette releases. Only "Sweethome Under White Clouds" -- in a different version -- ended up in the band's later catalog. Basically, this is the sound of tension, intensity, off-the-rails eroticism, pagan spirituality, and an utterly twisted sense of the perverse as wrapped into a post-punk aesthetic. The band's influences range wide and far from folk songs to Throbbing Gristle to the dynamics of bands like Joy Division, PIL, and even Germany's Can, though the Prunes' sonic approach was utterly unique. It is nocturnal always, often nightmarish, like the nether soundtrack to a carnival sideshow, it is, to borrow from Jean Dubuffett, art brut , outsider art of high poetic and aesthetic quality even when it is falling apart. Highly recommended for its excess as well as its achievement.

Ripped to MP3

1. Sandpaper Lullabye

2. Sleep Fantasy Dreams

3. Come to Daddy

4. Sweethome Under White Clouds

5. Sad World

6. Beast (Seven Bastard Suck)

7. Abbágall

8. Brain Damage

9. No Birds to Fly

CD2

1. "Din Glorious" 

The Virgin Prunes’ A New Form of Beauty (1981) was recorded and produced by the band itself. It includes the tracks of the first four parts of what was a five-part, mixed-format project with Rough Trade Records. Part 1 was a 7” record, Part 2 was a 10”, Part 3 was a 12”: these were recorded between July and October 1981. Part 4 was ‘Din Glorious’, released as an audio cassette, was a recording of extracts of a live event on 8th November 1981 at the Edmund Burke Theatre, Trinity College in Dublin. Part 5 was to be a film of ‘Performance, Exhibition, Event’ staged at the Douglas Hyde Gallery on 7th and 8th November 1981.