Recommendations of the Editorial team
After so many years, so many efforts, so many records. The Murder Album. The Cave Hammer. The perfect one. The art of the fugue. The main work. The poor poet first had to calm down during his lovelorn dance of “The Boatman’s Call” in order to lift this rock.
Then the time was right. The world didn’t care. And Nick Cave walked out the door, as he describes it in “Hallelujah,” and everything was as murky and terrible and disappointing as ever, and Nick Cave spoke: “I left my house without my coat/ Something my nurse wouldn’t have allowed/ And I took the small roads out of town/ And I passed a cow and the cow was brown/ And my pajamas clung to me like a shroud.”
Old man’s joke meets final tragedy
That’s what it sounds like when you’ve traipsed through hell only to see things for what they are as an old man in your pajamas. Cave is Bernhard Minetti in Thomas Bernhard’s play “Minetti”. A woman invites him, Hallelujah, but then he remembers: “My nurse had been my one salvation.” And turns back. At the end of the incredible song, the wonderful Mc Garrigle sisters sing, angelically of course: “The tears are welling in my eyes again I need twenty big buckets to catch them in/ And twenty pretty girls to carry them down.” Here old man’s humor meets final tragedy. Hallelujah!
Old Johnny Cash would give his last hunting rifle for this piece alone. But Cave is so cool that he starts the record with “As I Sat Sadly By Her Side,” a philosophical Socrates dialogue with a The Accomplished One: Nick Cave is walking and God is walking across the room.
Woman with a cat. Then the woman at his side says, well she says this: “And God does not care for your benevolence/ Anymore than he cares for the lack of it in others/ Nor does he care for you to sit/ At windows in judgment of the world He created.” I’m stopping here because the woman keeps preaching and doesn’t stop and the “Hey” is so beautiful.
Even better: the six-minute-long, melancholy Sermon is the single. “And No More Shall We Part” is a minstrelsy, which means that Cave actually sings (as he does on this record!), a snatched song to soften your stones: “And all oftenthose birds would’ve sung to your beautiful heart/ Lord, stay by me/ Don’t go down/ 1 will never be free/ If I’m not free now.” Here, as with all the songs, violinist Warren Ellis, the secret weapon of this album, does something almost superhuman.
The Bad Seeds are so good here because they don’t bother you
The tender “Love Letter” is dominated by a string ensemble next to the piano, and Cave bares without shame. Only with “Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow” is the grim sarcasm released and the drums used. “Doctor, doctor, I’m going mad”: Cave is suddenly as silly and childish as Dylan on “Time Out Of Mind”.
“God Is In The House” sounds ridiculously sacred – the piece mocks the clean village community of the American Midwest, which is confident in the Lord’s protection and always locks the door when it goes to bed: “Zero crime and no fear/ We’ve bred all our kittens white/ So you can see them in the night.” Lovely. The Almighty is also invoked again in “Oh My Lord”, a horror piece with the Bad Seeds as a rumbling sailor choir. And with a ruckus. “Sweetheart Come” is another mild love song in which Cave entices and clucks: “It seems we can be happy now.”
“The Sorrowful Wife” is titled like an early Hitchcock film. The piece begins with the wedding and immediately transitions into the changing of the seasons, the living room boredom, the moving chairs, counting the days… And then the Bad Seeds break out with all their might, suddenly the singer roars: “Come on and help me babe/ 1 was blind/ 1 was a fool baby.” The best moment on the record.
The elegiac “We Came Along This Road” is a murder ballad, but as the murderer leaves the house with a smoking gun, he remembers all his love again. The strings also melt away. “Gates To The Garden” leads gravely into “Darker With The Day”, the final tearjerker. A man alone, snow is falling: “These streets are frozen now/ As I search, in and out, above, about, below…” Mr. Cave goes for a walk – probably more out of boredom than looking for anything in particular. Because salvation is no longer a question of guilt and atonement. Cave would say with Wittgenstein: “There are, however, things that are inexpressible.” And God walks through the room.
An article from the ROLLING STONE archives
