Nick Cave

The Nick Cave who in the mid-80s lives in West Berlin, following the end of the London adventure with the Birthday Party, is a man going through a personal descent into hell. His life unfolds in a tiny apartment, where his time is split between heroin use, immersion in the German musical underground, and the slow writing of what will become his first novel, "And The Ass Saw The Angel".

In the blank space of that non-place that is his Berlin, at once a refuge for exiles and an open-air prison, Cave begins to sketch out an entire mythology — musical, personal, literary. His accomplices in this endeavour are the Bad Seeds, the extraordinary band featuring ex-Birthday Party member Mick Harvey on drums, Einstürzende Neubauten leader Blixa Bargeld on guitar, and Barry Adamson on bass.

With this line-up, the first album credited to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds takes shape: "From Her To Eternity", 1984, an explosive artistic statement from the frontman, a sort of tabula rasa where Delta and Mississippi blues live again through the forms of a chilled-out modern rock, where post-industrial percussion from hell and the beat of plantation work songs merge into a single indistinguishable whole.

With the second album, "Firstborn Is Dead", part of that furious assault shifts into lucid exposition, in a creation that has by now taken on its own organic complexity, a world of fiction, yes, but as alive as the plot of a great novel. "Firstborn Is Dead" is thus a new manifesto, where the tribal magma of the past congeals into the dry forms of a song-form heavy with ancestral moods, steeped in the deepest folk tradition — blues, gospel and spirituals — and in its darkest recesses.

The bond between Nicolas Edward Cave (born in Warracknabeal, Victoria, Australia, son of an English teacher and a librarian) and the world of Robert Johnson and the doomed bluesmen is, first and foremost, religious and literary in nature. His Protestant upbringing and sense of guilt — his father dies while young Nick is in prison — project him into a world of pain that Cave will seek out in his favourite works, as much in Grant Wood's painting "American Gothic" as in the books of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, and which he will translate into a genuine postmodern reworking of the Old Testament.

Through this existential process, the light of salvation and the darkness of sin are ruthlessly distinguished; over everything looms the tremendous weight of Predestination: the bad seeds, the seeds of evil, reside inexorably in the heart of man, and Redemption seems ambiguous, if not out of reach altogether. The absolute protagonist of this drama is, naturally, Nick Cave himself, who projects himself into a gallery of characters marked by a Fate more inexorable than ever — a new Robert Johnson irremediably drawn to perdition, to sex, to sin, even to crime.

In the lyrics of "Firstborn" lives an authentic parade of characters, drawing directly on blues iconography: there's the erotomaniac, corrupting satyr, there's the nightmarish scarecrow figure who proclaims himself "keeper of the forgotten wheat" and "King of nothing", there are the skies of divine wrath, there's the fugitive as a damned soul on Earth, there's the prisoner and his ritual of self-mutilation. But there are also direct or indirect references to musicians, the new archetypal figures: the already-legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson, the blind man set off along "the terrible tunnel of his world" toward Judgment Day, Dylan's "Wanted Man", and above all Elvis, "The King".

A mythology as blasphemous as it is laced with black humour, Cave's new Gospel turns Presley's birth in Tupelo (a second-born son, since "the first born is dead") into the coming of a new rock Messiah, of whom Cave himself is the terrible prophet.

On this album the Bad Seeds mean business, and amid them Nick Cave puts his very life on the line. His bandleading is arguably the greatest in rock music, comparable to that of great orchestra conductors or great jazz performers. He doesn't just arrange timbres and colours with a freedom that is at once rational and wildly imaginative, but he injects an intense dialectic into the singing and the accompaniment that manages to draw in every sonic parameter. Every harmonic and dynamic variable, from the most brutal noise to the most elementary melody, even the details of the recording, the stereo spread of the production and the listening spectrum, become part of his new idea of song, becoming - beyond mere devices for listening pleasure and completeness - true bearers of meaning. And this is perhaps best found in "Firstborn Is Dead".

The thunder-crash of a storm (as terrifying as it is theatrical) that opens "Tupelo", one of the absolute myths of the Australian bard, is the symbol of the dawn of time, of the chaos from which new life is born. The horror groove driven by Adamson's bass merges with the sound of nature, and the labyrinthine rumble of echoes turns into an equatorial pulse, in which the officiant Cave and his growled spoken delivery (half free-form rasp, half guttural singing) endlessly ratchet up the sense of doom. Only the bacchanalian invocation of the Bad Seeds manages to break the suffocating riff and the relentless, frenzied beat, while still keeping the voodoo flourishes and the arrhythmic, atonal guitar slashes constant.

At the opposite end of the spectrum lies the other direct dedication, the doppelgänger of "Tupelo": "Blind Lemon Jefferson", the terminal phase of Cave's process, a dark theorem of invisible chords and phantom touches. The malevolent shockwaves (pure vibrations of the bass strings) appear and vanish from the most spectral silence, until Cave utters his syllabary and brings the agony to a temporary halt, sketching out a decrepit refrain. The signs of the blues are by now drifting like scattered clouds, the limbs of the song form wander aimlessly in the void, or grope in the dark guided only by a sense of imminent end.

To get there, the songwriter musters considerable creative effort. First of all "Train-Long Suffering", in which the singer's sharp, onomatopoeic warble and the guitar hurtling along at a clattering speed (no longer a riff but a truly brutal loop) smash the blues intuitions even further. The off-beat rhythm section, in particular, seems to drive the locomotive, sending it derailing into infernal pirouettes of a cappella call-and-response (bolstered by the poet's sharp wordplay); each time the acrobatic cycle starts up again louder than before, each time cranking it up another notch (right up to the sardonic keyboards imitating the train's "chug-chug").

And the skeletal, Leadbelly-esque delta folk turn of "Say Goodbye To The Little Girl Tree", opposed by Bargeld's feedback, houses vocals that are first lascivious, then propulsive, with whip-cracks emerging from the stomp drumming, until they jangle into cacophony and shatter against the vocal line itself. No less coherent is the obligatory cover, "Wanted Man" written by Dylan for Johnny Cash, an emphatic crescendo sparked by obsessive hammering and the singer's roar.

But it's above all "Black Crow King" that refines (that is, makes even more perverse) his idea of a self-flagellating procession built on guitar fuzz, syncopated, hammering beats and spiritual choirs, which soon give way to a soliloquy for voice and organ. The frontman's monomania reaches lofty heights here: he doesn't just preach in a frenzy, he delivers outright visionary premonition.

Instead, the pianistic Cave carves out an important space in "Knockin' On Joe", gripped by a continuous unspooling of tragic torments, starting from a very distant gothic blues harmonica; the piano veers off or repeats itself relentlessly, as if in an offertory, while the supporting players shape mournful sound effects, though kept muted; the cotton-plantation singing like a shrill, humanistic dirge.

The Australian poet's ineffable opus number 2 is probably his most sensational legacy (in terms of scandal), with bursts of almost-buffoonish punk fury, tones of hellfire-and-brimstone biblical preaching, the persecutory impiety of a pagan rite; and whoever takes it as a merely self-punishing record has failed to grasp its sacred depth. What's there instead is the gothic howl, the supreme exhaustion, the verfremdung, the cecidere manus. And more: there's the reward. Its traumatic power lies in the author's clear-eyed gaze, in the truthfulness of a language that Cave makes vibrate especially when he refuses to back away from anything. Beyond the admirable lesson of a blues-rock filtered through the black box of the spirit, the work will leave an invaluable legacy, from new existentialist bands to post-punk singers, even to poets and novelists.

"Tupelo" is the supreme archetype of his whole method of cumulative citation: the cue for the lyrics comes from John Lee Hooker's "Tupelo Blues", which tells of the flood that ravaged the Mississippi town that was Elvis's birthplace. The refrain "looky looky yonder" comes from a medley recorded by Leadbelly with Alan Lomax, which also included that "Black Betty" featured on "Kicking Against The Pricks", the 1986 covers album that - together with the two volumes of "The Original Seeds: Songs That Inspired Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds" - is the ideal guide for grasping the roots of "Firstborn": the singer's immersion in the mythology of pre-World War II rural Southern blues, his homage to Blind Lemon Jefferson, Skip James, Charley Patton. "Knockin' On Joe" is the prelude to his first collaboration with director John Hillcoat (for the screenplay of "Ghost... Of The Civil Dead"), renewed recently with the music Cave composed for "The Road".

Reissued in 2009 - as part of a batch alongside the first stretch of his discography - with the addition of a 5.1 audio DVD, featuring previously unreleased videos.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

04/04/2010