Thanks random selection, this was a good one! I enjoyed listening to this album again in its entirety. Nick Cave is a songwriting giant, one of the all-time greatest, a fact which people are slowly waking up to. Nevertheless, at that early stage of his career, he was lumped together with a disparate bunch of artists and fashion freaks collectively and derogatorily dubbed "Goths". Renowned for the screamed vocals and live antics of his previous band Birthday Party as well as for his decadent junkie lifestyle, he wasn't considered serious enough to be called an artist or commercial enough to be called a rock star. My first experience of his music was an atmospheric scene in a poetic German movie called The Wings Of Desire, where he performed this album's "Carny" in a Berlin club. The next year I got into university, and that was when my musical self-education (and record collection) seriously started; I really dug into Cave's work, and was lucky enough to see him play live often enough. After his concerts, I'd hit the bars around Exarchia and there he'd be, drinking quietly until closing time. To fans who approached him, he was courteous but distant. You couldn't really tell he was an addict, but there was certainly a dark aura about him. That was when he was still based in Berlin; he had moved there in 1982 drawn by the decadence, cheap living, and vibrant artistic scene. Immediately he enlisted two locals for his band: drummer Thomas Wydler, and guitarist Blixa Bargeld who was to become his lieutenant for almost two decades. Blixa was never a great instrumentalist, but to me The Bad Seeds were never the same after his departure. Mick Harvey, a friend and bandmate from Cave's formative years in Australia, completes the band's lineup on this album. Bassist Barry Adamson was on his way out, and only appears on a couple of tracks here. The album was recorded at the Hansa studios, famous from Bowie's Berlin trilogy, and only a few meters' distance from The Wall. I can't imagine it was a happy time, recording under the gaze of Soviet guards standing on their concrete towers ready to shoot defectors on sight - but Cave is famously not in the happy business. That said, although the album is morose and experimental in sound, and often lyrically sinister, it's also at times achingly beautiful - never more so than in opener "Sad Waters" whose subdued bass and dreamy vocals are covered under a misty veil of atmospheric organ. At moments, very Joy Division-like. "The Carny" on the other hand sounds more like Tom Waits, mutant carnival music featuring instruments like xylophone and glockenspiel alongside a multitude of spooky sound effects as Cave narrates the story of a dead horse called Sorrow. "Your Funeral My Trial" is another beautiful ballad moving with an (ahem) funereal pace. The piano and organ are, once again, dominant. Cave croons in lyrical mood, but as you probably guessed by the title, this isn't your typical love song. Sample lyric "Here I am, little lamb/Let all the bells in whoredom ring/All the crooked bitches that she was/Mongers of pain/Saw the moon become a fang". "Stranger Than Kindness" isn't written by Cave; it is a poem by his former lover Anita Lane put to music by Blixa Bargeld. I love the trembly guitar that produces a similar effect to John Cale's viola in Velvet Underground. This is where Side A of my own vinyl copy ends; the Greek edition came out as a single LP with a gatefold cover, while the international one was a double album consisting of two EP's playing at 45 RPM. Side A, corresponding to the international edition's Record 1, was almost perfect. Side B/Record 2 is a different beast: Troubadour Cave takes a back seat to Madman Cave, with whom we were already familiar from Birthday Party. I loved "Jack's Shadow", it couldn't be better even if the story made sense: Jack and his shadow escape from a dungeon, his shadow becomes a wife, and then he peels it off himself with a knife. Apparently it's somehow inspired by the story of writer, and convicted murderer, Jack Henry Abbot. It's got a dramatic vocal sung over unruly bass and piano. Some of the unidentified noises could be Blixa: Cave always said that what he loved about his playing was that he made his guitar sound like anything except a guitar. The next song "Hard On For Love" is even more rowdy while the lyrics manage to mix the Bible with pornographic imagery. "She Fell Away" is another frantic piece, before the final "Long Time Man", a relatively straight cover of a 60's murder ballad by Tim Rose; this sounds like it should belong to Cave's previous LP Kicking Against The Pricks, a covers album that contained a number of similarly-themed folk and blues songs. Decades after I bought my Funeral... vinyl copy (for 900 drachmas, as the sticker on it attests) Cave's entire discography was re-released on Deluxe double CD/multi-tracked DVD-Audio packages. This prompted me to re-buy Your Funeral...My Trial, as well as a few others which I only had on vinyl - so, now I have three formats of the album, four if you count mp3. The DVD-Audio is well worth hearing; I mean I'm not a headphone guy, I prefer the music to fill the space around me, which befits an atmospheric album like this better than any typical guitar-bass-drums LP. While this is a skeletal rock band playing, they are quite inventive in the studio: Thomas Wylder reportedly plays a fire-extinguisher as a percussion, Blixa's guitar playing we already talked about, and Mick Harvey plays just about everything, and anything, else. Credit for the sound should also go to the producer Mark "Flood" Ellis,who later also produced seminal albums by Depeche Mode, U2, Smashing Pumpkins and many others. Extras of the deluxe edition include an inessential B-side called "Scum" (an amusingly petty attack on a rock journalist) but also an informative booklet and short documentary. Those 80's and early 90's albums by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are often considered inferior to his later, more intellectual, output, but I disagree. I find them to be more vital, edgy. and underground - but then again, it's the work of a smacked out young man wallowing in decadence at a Berlin squat. You wouldn't want him to remain the same. Nowadays he makes elegant and literary adult records, and dispenses philosophical advice online. One thing's constant: he's still a fantastic live performer. Especially when he's backed by The Bad Seeds, who (even without Blixa and Harvey) are still arguably the world's greatest backing band.
 |
| The CD/DVD-Audio Deluxe edition |
***** for Sad Waters, The Carny, Your Funeral My Trial, Stranger Than Kindness, Jack's Shadow
**** for She Fell Away
*** for Hard On for Love, Long Time Man
** for Scum
No comments:
Post a Comment