This was recorded and released as the second Boys Next Door album under the title The Birthday Party, but upon the band’s relocation from Australia to London they decided to change the band name altogether. Thus, subsequent reissues of the album list it as a self-titled debut from the Birthday Party, and it can now most easily be found on the Birthday Party reissue entitled Hee Haw (which also includes the three songs from the five-song EP of the same name which did not make the album). More importantly, despite how much The Birthday Party improves on Door, Door in quite literally every aspect, the album is still only a preview of the manic brilliance that was soon to appear with the Birthday Party’s finest album.

The band’s ability to both menace and punch increased exponentially between these two early albums, even if the constituent pieces are mostly the same. Tracy Pew’s bass is more apt to snarl, and the guitars stab and quiver just as much as they jangle. Cave’s vocals have taken a huge step forward from Door, Door — not only in his tone, but also in the confidence of his delivery, which often toys with and subverts expected rhythmic patterns (see the chorus to “Hats on Wrong” for a prime example of this). The keys and basically any other new wave trappings have been excised, leaving The Birthday Party as a gloomy, nervously twitchy, goth-leaning post-punk album. Anytime that the vestiges of that past style appear — as on “Waving My Arms” or the somewhat Clash-like reggae of “Riddle House” — they are swiftly buried in a far dourer atmosphere, in which every instrumental voice is a dagger honed to razor-bright sheen.

Highlights include the feedback shrapnel guitar solo of “The Hair Shirt” and the creepiness of “The Red Clock,” but on the whole, the album is of a much more unified atmosphere, far gloomier than Door, Door, and quite a bit less manic than the two Birthday Party albums to follow. The true showstopper here is “The Friend Catcher,” which lurches and lunges forward as Cave puts in his most committed vocal performance yet heard on record. He imitates a donkey and a train while railing about “a prison of sound,” and the shrieking feedback that introduces and closes the song eventually begins imitating a freight train screaming down the rails. The Birthday Party similarly finds the band gaining steam and picking up momentum as it rides the wide plains toward greater stops somewhere further down the line.