The Party's over, but Nick Cave sows the Bad Seeds to equally creepy effect.
Written: Aug 26 '09
Product Rating:
Pros: Remodels the Birthday Party's dissonance into literate, frenetic mini-epics.
Cons: His mannered singing and self-deprecating lyrical style had yet to evolve.
The Bottom Line:
Nick's 1984 debut with the Bad Seeds isn't as focused or consistent as future releases (like Tender Prey), but it's still sonically unnerving and the CD/DVD package top-notch.
deadmilkboy's Full Review: From Her to Eternity [Digipak] by Nick Cave & the ...
After The Birthday Party migrated from their native Australia to both London and Berlin, cutting a pair of abrasive, intense LPs and building up a reputation for brutal onstage antics, the Party were over in 1983. Singer NickCave would begin to realize his ambitions more fully and with greater resonance by first gathering a group of like-minded mates for what would become the Bad Seeds, many of whom he had played with before. MickHarvey, the multi-instrumentalist and long-time Cave collaborator who had taken over the drums in the final stretch of the Party's existence, was on board as was Magazine bassist BarryAdamson, who subbed for an incarcerated Tracy Pew during some of 1982. Another crucial member of the new band was imported from Germany, Einsturzende Neubaten guitarist BlixaBargeld. The collective was then topped off by a second guitarist, HugoRace, and Cave's girlfriend/muse AnitaLane, who had written the occasional lyric for both the Birthday Party ("A Dead Song," "Kiss Me Black") and the Bad Seeds.
25 years after the release of FROM HER TO ETERNITY, Cave has managed to become a prolific and influential singer/songwriter who moved from the dope sweat-fueled lamentations of his 1980s output into a middle-aged firebomb of a performer currently enjoying some of the most hearty critical acclaim of his career thanks to 2008's infectious yet resonant Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Cave also stretched out to work on film projects as both soundtrack composer and screenwriter, filling both duties on John Hillcoat's TheProposition. And the Grinderman one-off is still a really fun blast of rock & roll bedlam. Mute Records are celebrating by reissuing Cave and the Bad Seeds' back catalogue in newly-remastered deluxe edition packages containing stereo and Dolby 5.1/DTS versions of his albums, plus select bonus tracks, music videos and mini-documentaries.
The aforementioned debut album from the Bad Seeds is pivotal in the development of Cave's solo career in that he was working against the specter of his previous band. The Birthday Party were primarily a reaction to a British post-punk scene that had so disappointed them, they sought to blow their competition away by sheer audacity and abrasion. Both Prayers on Fire from 1981 and Junkyard from 1982 favored a sonic onslaught full of lacerating guitar feedback, brutal rhythms and Cave's bizarre, often frenzied pronouncements of lust, murder and desolation. On a couple of tracks from the band's final EPs, Cave had made his interest in Southern Gothic apparent on the murder ballad "Deep in the Woods" and the fiery fugitive tale of "Swampland." But those who had heard of the Birthday Party were left with the impression of a noisy thrash band whose lead singer imagined a horde of bloodthirsty bats set loose up a woman's skirt.
But the seven tracks which composed FROM HER TO ETERNITY sought to use the dissonance as more of a dramatic backbone. No longer were Rowland Howard and Mick Harvey's guitars spewing all over the churning rhythms of bassist Tracy Pew and drummer Phil Calvert. Instead, the instrumentation was notably sparse, cropping up to manifest some threat or thematic undercurrent evident in Cave's increasingly narrative-oriented psychodramas.
The first song on side two of the original LP, the perverted Twain homage SaintHuck, is a prime example of the give-and-take between Cave and his bandmates. Adamson's repetitive bass is matched only by the occasional jarring piano chord or drum roll in the first verse, as Cave establishes his mythological figure and sets him on his way into the destructive allure of "the great, great greasy city." The guitars amp up the tension in the choruses, where the piano and drums become more oppressive, and by punctuating the later verses. And when Huckleberry finds himself whistling his favorite river song, it is manifested in its literal form up until the end, when he winds up finally regretting having turned his back on Old Man River. The arrangement of this seven-minute nightmare epic is designed for optimal unease; even the sound of cracking knuckles works to fray your nerves at one point.
The title song is also a surefire highlight, with a pulsating rhythmic drive reminiscent of Suicide, tactile instrumental fills from all involved and a particularly queasy lyric, co-written with Anita, about obsessive lust. In the first verse alone, Cave drinks from the tears of the girl who lives above him, only to later pore over her diary, fantasize about her blue stockings and eventually go mad at the notion of actually possessing her and thus surrendering his manic desire. By this point, his madness has been well manifested by a both a spaced-out piano melody and walls of creaking guitar feedback and clatter.
Traces of the Birthday Party's cathartic hysteria can be found in that song and in track two, Cabin Fever! It's almost tempting to read the latter as a very lived-in, semi-autobiographical tune about isolated madness, with its heavily detailed manifestations of romantic ghosts and nervousness built into the image of a ship's captain thumbing through a scrapbook and slicing a peg with his cleaver hand only to carve it down to a splinter. It's also musically reminiscent of "Mutiny in Heaven," only without the wall-splattering drive of his old musical bandmates (Harvey's descending piano line and Adamson's hypnotic bass lines are more clearly mixed). Like in that song, Cave's multi-tracked but all guttural vocals often resemble voices inside his "beloved subconscious."
Cave's voice hadn't yet reached its full brooding potential, as most of his lyrics seem to come sarcastically spewing out of his mouth. Wings Off Flies, co-written musically with J.G. Thirlwell of Foetus and lyrically with Peter Sutcliffe (not the Yorkshire Ripper, but more likely instead the ex-member of Models also known as Pierre Voltaire), takes a comically flippant, sadistic bite to a slew of self-deprecating asides ("I plead to guilty to misanthropy/So, hang me! Ah'd appreciate it!"). The album's opening salvo, a cover of Leonard Cohen's Avalanche, is pitched fairly low sonically but has shots of turbulent drum fills and a seething lead vocal that aims its bitterness less at a condescending lover than at the same type of people who inhabit the final song on the album, A Box for Black Paul, namely those fans and press personalities who took Cave for granted.
At nine minutes in length, "A Box for Black Paul" is the pinnacle example of a type of song Cave couldn't have gotten away with on a Birthday Party LP. It's a ballad, stripped down to mainly a solemn piano and Cave's most apparent attempt at a traditional singing voice. The narrative concerns the passing of an outlaw in the wake of a public execution who delivers one last demand so that his soul may be at rest. There are some clear themes at play in the lyrics from the indifference of the crowd, the opportunism of the press men and the futility of art in the midst of mob rules. He also takes time to mention the "true Demon-Flowers" blooming in the bloodied ground, a nod to those who recall the sacrificial pyre of "Sonny's Burning."
The only other song left to mention on the original album, Well of Misery, is somewhat memorable in how it pays direct tribute to the chain gang songs of old Americana from the thwack of the spaced-apart percussive rhythm to the call-and-response between Cave and his backing vocalists/band. The spirit of both that song and "Wings off Flies," which could've been something Cave had written himself despite two other credited writers, would come to carry on to Cave and the Seed's follow-up album, The Firstborn Is Dead, released the next year.
The previous CD releases interjected the non-album single In the Ghetto (a brooding, less maudlin take on the old Mac Davis-penned Elvis Presley hit), backed with The Moon Is in the Gutter, after the songs that made up side one of the original LP. Another bonus track, the live version of "From Her to Eternity" featured in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, was tacked on at the end. The three of them relegated to the DVD section of the deluxe edition reissue as either playable on your home theater system or as an IPod-compatible download. Harvey, despite recently quitting the Bad Seeds after working with Cave for nearly three decades, helped oversee the Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS mixes of the recordings. That the instruments were multi-tracked in the studio as well as precise in their arrangements allows for a song like "From Her to Eternity" or "Cabin Fever!" to warrant frightening access into your soul. The rear and front channels utilize scraping guitar strings, spookhouse organ and frothing backing vocals to immerse you in the tension and cacophony. On tracks like "In the Ghetto" and "Wings off Flies," the drum tracks are relegated mainly to the rear speakers. And Cave's voice sounds fresh rooted in the center.
Aside for the laughably simple music video for "In the Ghetto," the main video-based extra on the DVD is part one in a continuing series of interview-based short films focused on a specific Bad Seeds album. Titled Do You Love Me Like I Love You? and directed by London-based artists Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, the first album's documentary piece runs roughly 41 minutes in length. Cave is nowhere to be found on the entire piece (instead quoted in Amy Hanson's liner notes and a separate lyric sheet), with the testimonies coming from collaborators past and present (including Warren Ellis and Thomas Wydler, who opened for the Party as Die Haut's drummer) as well as analysis and admiration from fans and journalists. Naturally, details are divulged about The Birthday Party and Cave's eventual formation of the Bad Seeds amongst the legendary Immaculate Conception side project, which also featured Lydia Lunch and Marc Almond. Harvey describes Nick's unrest with the sound of his former band and the accidental search for what would follow, with engineer Flood and fellow musicians Blixa Bargeld and Barry Adamson offering interesting tidbits about the recording and arrangements of particular songs. Some observations made by Gavin Friday, Autumn de Wilde and tour manager Jessamy Calkin sound instantly quotable, and both Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode and guitarist David Phillips recall experiences both good and bad involving run-ins with Cave.
FROM HER TO ETERNITY, for me, isn't Cave's first cohesive album (that would happen come 1986 and 1988). Being his inaugural solo debut released in a short space after the Birthday Party‘s dissolution, the ghost of his prior band lingers over a few of these tracks. They would either be addressed in thinly-veiled lyrics or in his own singing voice. The atmosphere is what makes these songs essential, as Cave had evolved past the avant garde din of old and sought to experiment with the aid of a group of strong musical foils. The old fire would seem to have been drowned and the ashes ours to keep, but something is starting to blossom from the cinders. It would only bloom more beautifully and creepily with time.
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