One of the few gaps in my Nick Cave collection. Remedying that ... now!
Artiste: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Nationality: Australian
Album: Your funeral ... my trial
Year: 1986
Label: Mute
Genre: Rock
Tracks:
Sad waters
The carny
Your funeral, my trial
Stranger than kindness
Jack's shadow
Hard on for love
She fell away
Long time man
Scum
Chronological position: Fourth album
Familiarity: “The good son”, “Henry's dream”, “The boatman's call”, “Murder ballads”, “No more shall we part”, “Abbatoir blues/The lyre of Orpheus”, “Let love in”, “Nocturama”.
Interesting factoid:
Initial impression: Very sparse, almost acoustic
Best track(s): Your funeral, my trial, Stranger than kindness, Jack's shadow
Worst track(s): Nothing really
Comments: As big a fan as I am of Cave, his earlier material is something of a grey area for me. I only listened to “Kicking against the pricks” briefly once (and that was an album of covers), and skimmed through “The firstborn is dead”, so I don't feel I've really given him a chance. I got into him from “The good son” onwards, and it's fair to say that by then his music had become a little more commercial and accessible than it would appear it started out, so I'm hopping in the time capsule back to 1986, to check this one out. There's certainly an air of depression and doom pervading it, probably due to his at the time deepening addiction to Sweet Lady H.
There's a bleak, sparse feel to the opener, with muddy vocals and a booming echoey drumbeat, while
The carny owes a lot to the style of Tom Waits, the vocal more spoken than sung really, while the Hammond sets up a mad, often deliberately off-key carnival theme and the drums again pound out like the bells of doom. It really does sound like something evil is coming to get you! There are hints too of the somewhat mellower direction Cave would lumber in after “The good son” and “Henry's dream”, on albums like “The boatman's call” and “No more shall we part”, with tracks like the title and
She fell away, but there's a definite feel of dark despair to
Stranger than kindness, with its mad churning guitar sound. What I really find missing from this album though is the later sensual and often melancholy but powerful violin of Warren Ellis, who would not join them for another ten years, but who would become a mainstay of the band and a force for change in their sound.
Like what I've heard of Cave's early work, this album has a somewhat rough, raw, unfocussed feel to it, almost like he was drunk (or high) when recording it. It's still a good album, but you could see in later years how refined his sound got, how deeper his lyrics became, and how much more attention he paid to structure and form in a song. Here, though the songs are good, they seem a little like jams that maybe could have been re-recorded or edited. Almost a case of in-your-face-here-we-are-deal-with-it. Not that I have a problem with that, but the Nick Cave I got to know was a little more, ah, restrained. A little more mature?
Overall impression: Raw, powerful, dark, ever so slightly evil. I like it!
Intention: Well I'm a big Cave fan but I need to listen more to his earlier material.