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Title: Goth Cheese
Review: Peter Murphy, solo, is a progenitor of a particularly heady brand of Goth cheese. Sickly thin, with a piercing stare and birdlike movements, he's a mesmerizing live performer even though he comes across as a cut-rate Bowie. Compelling as he is, he has a three note range (when he wants a bit of drama he hits his high end and, well, screams) and a ponderously opaque song catalogue. There's no meaning; just ambient surface and atmosphere. When his band is rocking the New Age, though, this rarely matters, which is why aLive Just for Love is such a disappointment. These stripped-down, Unplugged versions of his songs need all the accoutrements they can get. Many of these tunes are mid-tempo beauties in their studio versions - "Indigo Eyes", "Marlene Dietrich's Favourite Poem" - where they are densely layered with guitars and viola, percussion and keyboards - but they need their surface density to breathe. Here, they're skimpy, and expose Murphy's vocal shortcomings more than they should.
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