Recommendations of the Editorial team
Murder and manslaughter. Grateful subjects for someone who confessedly pours his obsessions into music and words. Although of course Nick Cave has always only created images of violence and madness, of illness and decay, just the socially acceptable clichés of a desolate artist’s existence under alcohol and drugs. Cave managed quite effortlessly to become a cult-revered Man of Sorrows and Jesus actor.
In reality, of course, he is a tidy, friendly gentleman who likes to drink too much and trains himself as a private scholar in the London Poets’ Club. The image of Cave emerges something like this: Journalist comes into the barren Cave room. He discovers old blues records on the wall and picturesque stacks of books on the floor: Aha, Nietzsche! Ah, the Bible! Ah, Shakespeare! A book about torture, next to Dante, writings about Jack The Ripper, collectible pictures by Jeffrey Dahmer! Combine: Nick Cave is working on murder ballads. The seeds of evil!
Nick Cave explores the language of violence in “Murder Ballads.”
But let’s be fair: Cave’s “Murder Ballads” are a veritable and worthy artistic effort. In meticulously detailed narrative horror scenarios, remarkably similar in their brutal laconicism to Springsteen’s “The Ghost Of Tom Joad”, Cave explores the “language of violence” that was the trigger for this collection.
The Bad Seeds’ music is a majestic dump in rumbling motion, torn, dilapidated, burning. No romantic Mack-The-Knife schmoozing, anywhere. Only the Kylie duet “Where The Wild Roses Grow” is suitable as a cozy, ironic lottery bed – and yet it is an act of cruelty: This is really and truly about the destruction of a media fictional character. While Polly Harvey naturally feels at home in the psychotic rant and murder.
It is a series of gruesome, coarse moralities, a role-playing prose in which only actions and events mean anything. The perpetrators speak themselves by describing their actions: “When I shot him, I was so handsome/ It was the light, it was the angle,” explains the murderer in “O’Malley’s Bar”. The incomprehensibility of the horror is nowhere robbed of its mystery by an imposed causality: the facts remain what they are.
Nick Cave observes this with both voyeuristic wonder and grim humor. To speak out about horror is to exorcise the demons in the garden.
