Okay, a final FINAL footnote to the series of Shearwater posts. When the band rolled into the AV Club studios in March 2016, it actually wasn’t to perform the entirety of Lodger, as they did for eventual release. Their intended contribution to the Undercover series was to do this Bauhaus cover which is actually even more off-brand for them.

As for the why, that’s covered in the preamble video:

And in the notes for said video, they add:

In 2016, we played Bauhaus’s “Kick in the Eye” for the Onion A.V. Club’s Undercover series. We had only rehearsed the song a handful of times, and this was the first and only take for the A.V. Club. We had all of our lights from our stage show, including the laser gloves, and we were like – why not use EVERYTHING?

Shearwater

And they liked the end result enough to include it in their The Sky Is A Blank Screen live album, though you don’t get the full laser glove effect from just the audio.