Release and Reception
While In the Flat Field received positive reviews in fanzine publications, the album was "absolutely slated" by the British weekly music press, according to Bauhaus biographer Ian Shirley. The NME review described the album as "nine meaningless moans and flails bereft of even the most cursory contour of interest, a record which deserves all the damning adjectives usually leveled at grim-faced 'modernists'." Sounds review was also negative: "No songs. Just tracks (ugh). Too priggish and conceited. Sluggish indulgence instead of hoped for Goth-ness. Coldly catatonic." Despite the negative reviews, In the Flat Field topped the independent charts, and made the UK Albums Chart for one week, peaking at number 72.
The album was first released on CD by 4AD in April 1988, with eight bonus tracks including the singles "Dark Entries", "Terror Couple Kill Colonel" and a cover of T. Rex's "Telegram Sam." Five of these bonus tracks had been previously compiled on the 4AD EP in 1983.
On October 19, 2009, 4AD/Beggars Banquet reissued the album as an Omnibus Edition, which features the 24-bit remastered CD of the original 9-track album in a replica mini-LP sleeve (with corresponding inner sleeve featuring the lyrics), plus a 16-song bonus disc of singles, outtakes, alternate recordings and original versions. The set comes inside a semi-long box, coupled with a 48-page book that includes comments from band members, photos, complete lyrics, complete tour date information for 1979 and 1980, and an essay by Kevin Brooksbank on the formation and creation of the band, the singles and the album.
In its retrospective review, Allmusic praised the album, writing "few debut albums ever arrived so nearly perfectly formed; that In the Flat Field practically single-handedly invented what remains for many as the stereotype of goth music – wracked, at times spindly vocals about despair and desolation of many kinds, sung over mysterious and moody music – demonstrates the sui generis power of both the band and its work". In 2012, Sonic Seducer magazine listed In the Flat Field at number 4 in its list "10 Key Albums for the Gothic Scene", calling it a work that had shattered outdated ideas of rock music.
Read more about this topic: In The Flat Field
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