The last full-length studio album from the Birthday Party is in many ways a continuation of the shadowy yet explosive noise of Prayers On Fire. In some respects, though, it begins to show more visibly the signs of a band teetering ever close to implosion and eventual collapse. Some of its heights hit higher than Prayers On Fire, but it also suffers from more filler material, which makes it not quite the definitive Birthday Party album.

The album’s real triumphs are “Hamlet,” “Big-Jesus-Trash-Can,” and “Junkyard,” with “She’s Hit” and “Dead Joe” hitting almost the same high bar while adding new elements to the Birthday Party’s arsenal. Phil Calvert’s freeform machine-gun drumming on “She’s Hit” is particularly striking, and “Dead Joe” finds the band reaching new heights of ferocity, with its violently modal and nearly amusical thrust. “Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow),” with its threatening bass line that seems to anticipate “Loverman” by over a decade, also shows Cave’s words stretching their muscles a bit, as he conjoins Shakespearean wordplay and 1940s American gangster imagery. “Big-Jesus-Trash-Can” is a similar stroke of demented lyrical genius, and features some of Cave’s nastiest, most lunatic vocals to date.

Elsewhere, however, several of the tracks penned completely by Rowland Howard seem to be pushing the band backward, away from damaged punk cacophony and toward the smoother, catchier post-punk of Door, Door and The Birthday Party. This tension is most noticeable on “Several Sins” and “The Dim Locator,” the latter of which features lyrics (from Howard) that cross the line from surrealism into pure nonsensical wordplay. The band’s youthful overindulgences also impacted the album, and saw future Bad Seed Barry Adamson filling in on bass for a few tracks while Tracy Pew was locked up briefly for a drunk-driving offense. If on Prayers On Fire, the Birthday Party felt settled in their own unsettling skin, on Junkyard they feel slightly more awash in cross-cutting trends around them, with a few tracks feeling a bit like Joy Division, and a few others — notably “Junkyard” — cavemanning themselves into a mottled, no wave stomp that surely influenced Michael Gira’s Swans (who formed in 1982, the year of Junkyard’s release). All of this means that while there’s enough bile and wide-eyed chaos to place Junkyard above some of the lesser Bad Seeds outings, there’s not nearly enough accidental brilliance or half-drunk mania to match Prayers On Fire (or the final Birthday Party material, for that matter — the Mutiny! and The Bad Seed EPs).

(Also of historical interest is the song “Release The Bats,” which was released as a single (backed with “Blast Off”) and then added to Junkyard on its later CD reissue. Cave’s torpid Elvis imitation, lyrics that include the lines “My baby is a cool machine, she moves to the pulse of her own generator/ She says damn that sex supreme, she says damn that horror bat/ Sex vampire, cool machine,” and the song’s rockabilly swing are probably the closest that the Birthday Party ever got to actual gothic music, but it’s clearly enough of a bead to see where some of the genre’s eventual hysterical caricatures might have drawn inspiration.)