FEATURE:
A Buyer’s Guide
Part Twenty-Two: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
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FOR this edition of A Buyer’s Guide…
it is going to be very hard to whittle down the very best albums of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, as they have been so consistent through their career! I would urge you to check out all their albums, but there are a few that really stand out. I will also recommend one that is underrated, and a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds-related book that is worth getting. If you are new to the band, then I hope this guide assists and you get a better understanding of their work. With the Melbourne band’s album, Ghosteen, of last year still ringing and resonating in the mind, I wonder where they will head next. Here is a list of the essential albums from one of music’s…
ABSOLUTE best.
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The Four Essential Albums
Your Funeral... My Trial
Release Date: 3rd November, 1986
Label: Mute
Producers: Flood/Tony Cohen
Standout Tracks: Your Funeral My Trial/Hard on for Love/She Fell Away
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Nick-Cave-The-Bad-Seeds-Your-Funeral--My-Trial/master/17242
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2tCVmRY54oIgYASh50Ra4Q
Review:
“Reduced to a quartet for the most part, with Barry Adamson joining Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey and Thomas Wydler on only a couple of tracks, the Bad Seeds turn from the interpretive triumph of Kicking Against the Pricks to another strong high, the mostly-original Your Funeral...My Trial. The one cover is a sharp, unsurprisingly dramatic version of Tim Rose's "Long Time Man." As for the rest of the album, Trial shows the Seeds working as, again, a remarkably accomplished and varied act, ever available and ready to explore a wide range of musics distilled into Cave's often dark, always passionate vision. Arguably Cave and company have by now so clearly established their overall style that Your Funeral...My Trial is much more a refinement of the past than anything else, but so good is their work that resistance is near impossible. If anything, the brooding power of the Seeds is more restrained than ever, suggesting destructive endings and overwhelming love without directly playing it. Songs like "Jacks Shadow" and the gentler but still melancholy moods of "Sad Waters," detailing a riverside scene between a couple, are simply grand. The opening title track sets the mood well, Cave handling not merely vocals but Hammond organ, adding a strangely sweet air to the late-night atmosphere of the piece. "The Carny" is a definite highlight, the cracked music-box/carnival accompaniment courtesy of Harvey utterly appropriate for Cave's tale of a circus gone horribly wrong in ways Edward Gorey would appreciate. "Hard On for Love," as the title pretty clearly gives away, is at once sensual and blunt right down to the lyrics, Biblical references and all, as the feverish music rises in a tide of emotion” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: The Carny
Murder Ballads
Release Date: 5th February, 1996 (U.K.)
Label: Mute Records
Producers: Victor Van Vugt/Tony Cohen/The Bad Seeds
Standout Tracks: Stagger Lee/Henry Lee (ft. PJ Harvey)/The Kindness of Strangers
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Nick-Cave-And-The-Bad-Seeds-Murder-Ballads/master/18354
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/4EMI48u2Fn6srocaXjuAcJ
Review:
“In some ways, Murder Ballads is the record Nick Cave was waiting to make his entire career. Death and violence have always haunted his music, even when he wasn't explicitly singing about the subject. On Murder Ballads, he sings about nothing but death in the most gruesome, shocking fashion. Divided between originals and covers, the record is awash in both morbid humor and sobering horror, as the Bad Seeds provide an appropriate backdrop for the carnage, alternating between blues, country, and lounge-jazz. Opening the affair is "Song for Joy," a tale from a father who has witnessed his family's death at the hands of serial killer. It is the most disturbing number on the record, lacking any of the gallows humor that balances out the other songs. Cave's duets with Kylie Minogue ("Where the Wild Roses Grow") and PJ Harvey ("Henry Lee") are intriguing, but the true tours de force of the album are "Stagger Lee" and "O'Malley's Bar." Working from an obscure, vulgar variation on "Stagger Lee," Cave increases the sordidness of the song, making Stagger an utterly irredeemable character. The original "O'Malley's Bar" is even stronger, as he spins a bizarrely funny epic of one man's slaughter of an entire bar. During "O'Malley's Bar," Cave and the Bad Seeds are at the height of their powers and the performances rank among the best they have ever recorded” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: Where the Wild Roses Grow (ft. Kylie Minogue)
The Boatman's Call
Release Date: 3rd March, 1997
Labels: Mute/Reprise
Producers: Flood/Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Standout Tracks: People Ain't No Good/(Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For?/Idiot Prayer
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Nick-Cave-The-Bad-Seeds-The-Boatmans-Call/master/18393
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/44R7BgUO8sNIXTD7X9HYwZ
Review:
“The Boatman's Call is Cave's plea for redemption, an album every bit as dignified as its predecessor is deranged. After spending much of his career spinning yarns out of other people's misery, Cave-- emerging from a divorce and a highly publicized but short-lived affair with PJ Harvey-- comes clean about his own. On the stirring piano-based hymns "Into My Arms" and "There Is a Kingdom", he looks to religion less as a convenient dramatic device and more as the genuine refuge for the lonely soul. Cave had flirted with tender balladry many times before, but whereas previous turns like "Straight to You" and "The Ship Song" were shot through the Bad Seeds' widescreen lens, here, the atmosphere is so spare and intimate, you feel like you're curled up inside Cave's piano. More than any other album in this batch of reissues, The Boatman's Call is greatly enriched by a remaster that amplifies the magnitude of Cave's loneliness, from the burning-ember ambience of "Lime Tree Arbour" to Ellis' trembling violin lines on the absolutely devastating "Far From Me". But even though The Boatman's Call is Cave's most confessional, open-hearted album, its sense of sorrow and catharsis transcends a strictly personal interpretation. It speak volumes about the album's universality that its songs have soundtracked everything from Michael Hutchence's funeral to Shrek 2” – Pitchfork
Choice Cut: Into My Arms
Skeleton Tree
Release Date: 9th September, 2016
Label: Bad Seed Ltd.
Producers: Nick Cave/Warren Ellis
Standout Tracks: Girl in Amber/I Need You/Skeleton Tree
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Nick-Cave-The-Bad-Seeds-Skeleton-Tree/master/1054118
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/34xaLN7rDecGEK5UGIVbeJ
Review:
“Anthrocene has echoes of the Doors’ Horse Latitude – it’s an angry collage of sound whipped into a frenzy by an unforgiving, raging vocal – but some of the album’s best moments tap into the almost transcendently eerie calm that follows grief. I Need You is astonishingly gorgeous: a song from a numb void where emotion has been drained but love flickers like a faraway spark. In the duet Distant Sky, Else Torp offers a fleeting solace in heightened senses and the new joys of the world around, before Cave shatters the peace with furious devastation: “They told us our gods would outlive us, but they lied.” Some moments – the singer’s cry over the sea in the title track, to be met by an empty echo – are almost too personal to bear, and it’s hard to know who exactly he addresses in the album’s final line, “And it’s all right now.”
Skeleton Tree will take its place in the racks alongside Justin Bieber or whoever, where it will sit like a gaping open wound. It will prove scant consolation to the singer that the worst kind of trauma has produced a piece of art that will surely prove unforgettable to all who hear it” – The Guardian
Choice Cut: Jesus Alone
The Underrated Gem
Nocturama
Release Date: 3rd February, 2003
Labels: Muse/ANTI-
Producers: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds/Nick Launay
Standout Tracks: Wonderful Life/Bring It On/Rock of Gibraltar
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Nick-Cave-And-The-Bad-Seeds-Nocturama/master/23089
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/3FgAZqG6AJyYxpLQkHckxS
Review:
“Forget the fangless, dumbed-down profile of goth-pop, with its fishnets and black nail polish. For Nick Cave, unrepentantly churning out his twelfth album of literary, theatrical love songs, the interior world of darkness has nothing to do with exterior trappings. On Nocturama, the Australian singer-pianist-songwriter negotiates the slippery slopes of romance and fate with piano ballads (“Still in Love,” “Right Out of Your Hand”) and muscular thrash (the rousing “Bring It On” and the fierce “Dead Man in My Bed”) that hearken back to his days with proto-goth ghoulfathers the Birthday Party. The songs are rousing and poetic, with a deep bottom and gorgeous piano lines vying like the forces of darkness and light” – BLENDER
Choice Cut: Babe, I'm on Fire
The Latest Album
Ghosteen
Release Date: 4th October, 2019
Labels: Ghosteen/Bad Seed
Producers: Nick Cave/Warren Ellis
Standout Tracks: Spinning Song/Waiting for You/Galleon Ship
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Nick-Cave-And-The-Bad-Seeds-Ghosteen/release/14345514
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0zKVAWaIr8KEibn310KCpN
Review:
“According to a statement by Cave, the songs on the first disc are the children, the songs on the second are their parents, and Ghosteen is “a migrating spirit”. You could also take the whole thing as an attempt to express and understand difficult feelings through fantastical allegories, the meanings of which may not be clear even to Cave. The album opens with Spinning Song, which imagines Elvis and Priscilla Presley as a fairytale king and queen planting a tree in their garden; when Elvis dies a feather from a bird nesting in the tree spins into the room of someone listening to the radio. Cave professes his everlasting love before announcing that peace will come in time. All of this is set to a seesawing church organ against which Cave the singer is more impassioned and mournful than ever.
It sets the tone for an album that combines stately music from the Bad Seeds — rich with floating harmonies, restrained piano lines and gliding strings — with ecstatic flights of the imagination. On Bright Horses Cave envisions a pack of wild horses with manes of fire, concluding that there is nothing beyond life as we see it: “There ain’t no Lord . . . there’s no shortage of tyrants and no shortage of fools.” Sun Forest imagines a spiral of children climbing up to the sun, waving goodbye to the old world in heavenly rapture. Wheezing harmoniums, ominous backing vocals and an arrangement somewhere between lush easy listening and atonal experimentalism add to a mood of poetic seriousness that’s worthy of Leonard Cohen or Scott Walker” – The Times
Choice Cut: Ghosteen Speaks
The Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Book
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Murder Ballads - 33 1/3
Author: Santi Elijah Holley
Publication Date: 22nd October, 2020
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Synopsis:
“In a bar called The Bucket of Blood, a man shoots the bartender four times in the head. In the small town of Millhaven, a teenage girl secretly and gleefully murders her neighbors. A serial killer travels from home to home, quoting John Milton in his victims' blood. Murder Ballads, the ninth studio album from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is a gruesome, blood-splattered reimagining of English ballads, American folk and blues music, and classic literature. Most of the stories told on Murder Ballads have been interpreted many times, but never before had they been so graphic or profane. Though earning the band their first Parental Advisory warning label, Murder Ballads, released in 1996, brought Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds their biggest critical and commercial success, thanks in part to the award-winning single, "Where the Wild Roses Grow," an unlikely duet with Australian pop singer, Kylie Minogue. Closely examining each of the ten songs on the album, Santi Elijah Holley investigates the stories behind the songs, and the numerous ways these ballads have been interpreted through the years. Murder Ballads is a tour through the evolution of folk music, and a journey into the dark secrets of American history” – Waterstones