Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads - NEWMINT CD

Nick Cave has been writing songs about killing and other evil things since he first surfaced in 1980 as the Birthday Party's pale, skinny, goth-punk version of Jim Morrison. But the murder ballads that provide this set's title are different, tantalisingly deliberate. Sure, there's plenty of trademark Cave here, but Murder Ballads is a fascinating concept album that uses the narrative ballad form of the English folk tradition to tell of murder: random deaths, passion crimes, and killing sprees, all in one package. Cave clearly thrives in this genre, and he produces some of his sharpest and most facile writing to date: "Song of Joy", a genuinely scary campfire mystery of a murdered family and an unnamed killer, chillingly weaves clues into the lyrics, while "Where the Wild Roses Grow" is a narrative duet in which killer (Cave) and victim (pop star Kylie Minogue) reveal parallel tales. Cave even shows his knack for adaptation on Bob Dylan's "Death Is Not the End", recontextualising a song of heavenly comfort into a sort of zombie "We Are the World" (featuring Minogue, PJ Harvey, Shane MacGowan and others) in which "death is not the end" of pain and suffering. Above all, Murder Ballads should be heard as a work of pulp fiction--as sensationally funny as it is harrowing. The already violent traditional song "Stagger Lee" becomes gangsta folk, so ridiculously packed with obscenity and brutality it would make the Geto Boys cringe. And Cave's (unintentional?) point to would-be censors--that bad-ass songs existed long before rappers polluted the airways--should not be missed.

In his trademark bottomless voice, Nick Cave narrates one tragic, violent tale after another. In excruciating detail, he examines the fine apects of murder, varying viewpoints between victims and killers, and investigating the dialogue between them from many angles. MURDER BALLADS, his ninth release with the Bad Seeds, is Cave at his most raw and lyrical.
He delves unflinchingly into macabre territory with the backing of his band's spare, moaning, reverb-rich playing--by turns sweetly tuneful and disjointedly dirge-like. PJ Harveyassumes the role of a woman scorned on "Henry Lee", in which she describes stabbing to death the man who rejects her. Her story is interspersed with choruses of, "La la la la la/La la la la lee/A little bird lit down on Henry Lee", adding a sense of perverse humor to the ballad's bleakness. On "Where the Wild Roses Grow", a man kills his lover, explaining that "all beauty must die", and Kylie Minogue provides the innocent, breathy voice of the dead lover with a ghostly, haunting softness. Yet amid the troubling, startling brutality runs a sense of fragility and a poetic lyricism that makes these songs linger.

 

1. Song Of Joy

2. Stagger Lee

3. Henry Lee

4. Lovely Creature

5. Where The Wild Roses Grow

6. Curse Of Millhaven

7. Kindness Of Strangers

8. Crow Jane

9. O'Malley's Bar

10. Death Is Not The End