This came out in 2000 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
When Peter Murphy dies, snide journos will have plenty of fun whipping up headlines with the words Bela Lugosi’s Dead — the monstrously morbid hit that assured Murphy and his band Bauhaus a place in history as the founding fathers and dark princes of goth.
To say the spectres of Bela and Bauhuas have overshadowed the rest of Murphy’s career is like saying Madonna is a bit of a tease; by contrast, the five albums he’s issued since the band parted ways in 1983 are relegated to footnotes in his bio. This 16-track retrospective aims to correct that oversight, revisiting the first decade of his solo career, during which he inched away from his band’s bleak, sepulchral chill and applied his rich, crypt-kicking baritone to a David Bowie / Iggy Pop art-pop oeuvre best embodied in the single Cuts You Up and his glammy cover of Pere Ubu’s Final Solution. It probably won’t be enough to change his obituary, but it’s a decent reminder that for Murphy, there is life after Dead.
