NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS: "Murder Ballads"

Original released on CD Mute CDSTUMM138

(UK 1996, February 5)

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. (Stephen Erlewine in AllMusic)

NICK CAVE: "Idiot Prayer"

Original released on Double CD Bad Seed BS019

(EU, June 2020)

Nick Cave has left it awfully late in his career to record his masterpiece, but with "Idiot Prayer" he removes any argument about which is his best album. The cover promises 'Nick Cave alone at Alexandra Palace' - just a man and a piano. Alone with his astonishing cast of gods, ghosts, lovers, murderers and victims, all brought to visceral life by Cave's emotive, spare reading of his best songs over 40 years. How on earth he finds new life in Mercy Seat defies the myriad covers - Cash included - of this dark hymn, but find new nuance he does. Put this album on continuous play for a day - seriously, it works just as well as 'background music' as it does on close examination - and be drawn into Cave's dark world. Darkness has never felt as beautiful as this: Cave has stared pandemic irrelevance in the face and delivered it a massive smite. Five stars hardly seems enough for an album that transcends masterpieces such as "The Boatman's Call", "No More Shall We Part" and the underrated "Push The Sky Away". Incredible, simply incredible. (Owen Davies in AllMusic)

NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS: "The Boatman's Call" (+ Bonus Tracks)

Original released on CD Mute CDSTUMM142

(UK 1997, March 4)

"Murder Ballads" brought Nick Cave's morbidity to near-parodic levels, which makes the disarmingly frank and introspective songs of "The Boatman's Call" all the more startling. A song cycle equally inspired by Cave's failed romantic affairs and religious doubts, "The Boatman's Call" captures him at his most honest and despairing - while he retains a fascination for gothic, Biblical imagery, it has little of the grand theatricality and self-conscious poetics that made his albums emotionally distant in the past. This time, there's no posturing, either from Cave or the Bad Seeds. The music is direct, yet it has many textures, from blues to jazz, which offer a revealing and sympathetic bed for Cave's best, most affecting songs. "The Boatman's Call" is one of his finest albums and arguably the masterpiece he has been promising throughout his career. (Stephen Erlewine in AllMusic)