The Doomed Bird of Providence – Blind Mouths Eat

Blind Mouths Eat was the band’s 2nd album. As much as the first album dealt with grim subject matter the 2nd was perhaps worse in some respects. The material was drawn from two main sources. One was Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island by Rebe Taylor. One thing Taylor looked at were the horrendous ‘pirates’ that loitered around parts of the southern coast and their atrocious treatment of local indigenous Australians. Another source was a privately printed diary of a women who lived on coastal Western Australia and who gradually dies of tuberculosis whilst describing her (deteriorating) day-to-day life.

The album received a very good critical response, including a full page review in Wire Magazine by Clive Bell:

“Sometimes cussedness is an essential virtue for musicians. The Doomed Bird Of Providence’s Mark Kluzek oozes cussedness like sweat. He’s an Australian in exile, assembling a group of Brit players to realise his singleminded vision, which involves Kluzek barking out blacker than black tales of horror and misery from Australia’s early history. Blind Mouths Eat is his second bulletin from the festering underbelly of 19th century Oz.”