And the walls ran red around me, A warm arterial POLL: Nick Cave Album Poll (redux)

had to vote from her to eternity now and forever but having held the stance that it's all downhill from the good son for twenty years (sorry veg) i was stunned when i finally heard abbatoir blues/the lyre of orpheus at how strong it was, the only one post the first five i wouldn't rmde at.

shoutout to spin for this cover at a time when even their putting morrissey or robert smith on the cover seemed pretty bold - http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thing?.out=jpg&size=l&tid=25355241

tawana bradley, emanuel revici, perry farrell: spin backing alot of the wrong horses there

My love for Henry's Dream is thus: for me it is the bridge between the old and new Nick Cave -- yes, there's the sad loss of the dissonant noisy punkishness...it's still there but it's contained within the aggressiveness of the band's playing, and the viciousness of his lyrics, and the snarl of his delivery, everything's been put together with care and craft and thought and the work shows. Nothing's wasted, nothing's overused...everything they've done up to that point is IN this album, it's just done way better than it had ever been done til then.

I feel like this album has his *consistently* best songwriting he's ever done. The words stand just as well on the page as they do in the song...so many great turns of phrase, so many great short films in this album....I can't say enough how much I love this album.

Abbatoir/Lyre is the one that I play the most, and I have them all. Just a stunning set of songs.

it's a great album. My favorite track in particular, "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" is a gorgeous song

speaking of abbatoir/lyre, will never forget how :0 i was when this happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFPSuAZCag

yeah I felt p weird about that

it was cute tho

i thought nick was more popular

Nick is, but clearly I am not ;_;

lol

the good son for mostly sentimental reasons

those are good reasons

the good son has got my two favourite nick songs on it (ship song, weeping song) and the rest of it's great too so that i reckon

it's maybe my second favorite.

weeping song rules

yeah, it's a totally ridiculous song really by i do love it. ship song is flat-out amazing

by but

my friend's sister got married around when that came out, and her and her partner both had little kids so all the kids wore fairy wings and the bridge & groom walked down the aisle to the ship song with the little fairy kids, so the song now just makes me <3

I know everyone in the world did that too but becasue I knew them it just felt kinda awesome and special

hey it's that kind of a big sweeping romantic song, it suits grand gestures

Tender Prey

also otm

fck i just do not know.

Sorry vg cannot go for Henry's Dream, bcz tho Papa won't leave you is top 10 all-time Cave for me there's something I've never enjoyed about the album - production's a bit obvious or flat or something. I'd always enjoy I Had a Dream or Brother My Cup live, but on the album they leave me cold. I think of Tender Prey/Good Son as the transitional albums, Cave properly figuring out the strings/violence drama palette, and still untsoppable; Henry's Dream is more like signpost towards the autopilot - a fast one, a slow one, solid arrangement, keep lots of words coming.

all about 1-6 for me - I think maybe Good Son his best and strangest set of songs, but really Her To Eternity is it, flag planted in out there ground of ott poetry and blixa noises and echo and drama and what a fucking record.

various otms about ship and weeping songs

+ shout for live seeds

Kicking Against The Pricks is my go-to Cave album.

from her to eternity is awesome no doubt. there's kinda no wrong answer. I think I'm just crazyloveinsane about Henry's Dream

like saint huck, cabin fever, the moon is in the gutter...still some of my favorite go-to tracks

there's kinda no wrong answer

Nocturama (2003)

I dunno how I got so hooked on Henry's Dream - it wasn't even the first album I heard or anything.

I'm guessing it has a lot to do with being the first one I heard but it's Henry's Dream by a considerable distance for me. The wife and I both agree that if we could go back in time we'd use "Straight to You" as our first dance wedding song.

oh me too

man. shit. i cant do this. fuck.

going for I Sat Sadly By Her Side if i ever marry.

Jack The Ripper would be an awesome wedding song

there's so little that I haven't enjoyed on that list. it's only really nocturama and lazarus that don't do much for me. don't think there's anyone else who's been a simple pleasure for so long.

your funeral or the good son for me

I'd always enjoy I Had a Dream or Brother My Cup live, but on the album they leave me cold.

Live Seeds exists specifically bcz Nick and Mick hated the production on HD so much

I'll go with Henry's Dream for one specific reason - the key change in the final verse of 'Straight To You' is one of my favourite things in music ever.

Your Funeral...My Trail.

i adore the boatman's call, even though i've never been able to get into anything else nick cave has done, especially not has rawk bday party mode, so, that

especially not has rawk bday party mode

read this as 'especially not 'has rawk, bday party' mode'.

good son vs tender prey for me. i have to lean towards good son

I'm a huge fan of Henry's Dream, and the songs he played from it live on that tour were some of the most powerful performances I've ever seen. (I mostly keep my Cave-worshipper in check, but there are few artists who had as big an impact on me as he did from about the time I was 16 on through my mid-twenties.) But I still think it's a close second to Your Funeral, My Trial - that run from From Her to Eternity through Kicking Against the Pricks (or from Junkyard, really) is kind of the canonical Nick Cave for me, and Your Funeral, when it was new, seemed like such a shocking gesture - nobody even playing at that level and here's a double-EP, what the hell, and it's better than anything else around by a good long distance.

I mean let's have a look at it.

. "Sad Waters" 5:00
2. "The Carny" 8:01
3. "Your Funeral, My Trial" 3:56
4. "Stranger Than Kindness" Anita Lane, Blixa Bargeld 4:47
5. "Jack's Shadow" Cave, Mick Harvey 5:41
6. "Hard On for Love" 5:19
7. "She Fell Away" 4:30
8. "Long Time Man"

I don't much care for "The Carny" - it's fine and all, and Blixa delivering the Ringmaster lines is all-time classic, but it's kind of obvious - scary carnival! Any complaints NC might have about being lumped in with goths should be referred to the time he wrote about the scary carnival slogging through the rain. But "Sad Waters" is one of his most beautiful ballads, the title track is beautifully constructed & has some of his most wrought lines from that lamp-lit symbolist-worshipping era of his stuff ("a bauble moon did mock/and trinket stars did smile," young aerosmith takin NOTES on this stuff even if "did mock/did smile" is not my speed); "Jack's Shadow" is a masterpiece and so's "Hard On For Love" in all its drunken studio-dare glory. "She Fell Away" I feel like is one of the more interesting pieces there though it's in the shadow of the big players I've just named, "Stranger Than Kindness" is an Anita Lane lyric & not as good music musically is terrific, and "Long Time Man" I consider one of the best covers ever done: that song live, more than once, is the one that had a friend and I leaving the building saying "that one...that was the best music I've ever heard." The interplay of the backing vocals and the vocal especially, that romanticized prison-gang feel he was so into in that era - it hits its zenith here.

there are few artists who had as big an impact on me as he did from about the time I was 16 on through my mid-twenties

samesies

feeling like it'll come down to tender prey vs the good son for me (actually toyed w/voting for let love in last nite)

Voted Tender Prey. I haven't felt compelled to listen to Cave is some time but those mid-80s through early 90s albums were huge for me at the time.

yeah, no-one meant more to me in my teens and 20s. I'm cheered to see him where he is now in british culture - broadly admired in culture-show culture, brighton literary type, respected middle aged art rocker producing albums that will get four to five stars in the broadsheets- but it sits uneasily with yeah, the intensity of the connection i had to dead joe/mutiny!/wanted man/mercy seat/ etc etc

Let Love in would definitely tempt me if the poll were just post-good son albums.

i adore the boatman's call, even though i've never been able to get into anything else nick cave has done

No More Shall We Part is basically Boatman II if you've not heard that. Lyre Of Orpheus might work too

No More Shall We Part's songs are considerably better than The Boatman's Call's imo - Boatman was basically the moment where the bloom came off the rose for me

there's kinda no wrong answer

― woof, Friday, July 13, 2012 10:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

aha i voted for this

i'm hungover and the weather is particularly gloomy and this thread made me go back to the boatman's call and it was so perfect - the gravitas of the romance, the careful richness of the lyrics - just the right balance between indulgent gloom and dry detachment, the maudlin gorgeousness of the sound. i actually listened to it twice b2b, i'd forgotten that it's probably one of my favourite albums ever.

i did hear the cave albums that followed it inc no more shall we part and lyre of orpheus but they never hit the spot in the same way - i remember that i didn't feel like cave's singing was nearly as strong (or maybe it was too strong, too strained)

Boatman's call feels like a one-off to me - the song-cycle feeling, quite spare, intimate - no more shall we part felt more literary - I liked the arrangements, felt like they pushed the best of the songs into something else again (patchy tho, iirc - haven't listened in a while)

i respect you thomp but that is strange taste

I totally agree about the production on Henry's Dream being a misstep but I think it's the peak of his songwriting. I saw one "solo" Cave show where he re-imagined those songs as piano ballads. Jack The Ripper & Brother My Cup is Empty became untouchable that night.
I probably listen to Kicking Against The Pricks most of all for some reason. There's just something I love about the way the band plays on that and it feels like Nick's truly discovering the evil crooner aspect to his voice and reveling in it.
I think I'm going to go with the cop out vote of Live Seeds though. Those versions are just great performances by a band at their peak.

nocturama: it's the most comfortably middle-aged of all his middle-aged records, the only one post-'92 or so that doesn't sound like there are too many people in the room; cave's deployment of his voice-verging-on-quavering vocal tic is probably at its most convincing ... i don't know.

i don't really trust the songs on let love in or boatman's call or murder ballads or no more shall we part

i think there are probably arguments for the two that came out afterwards, after i had stopped paying attention, being better

there are definitely arguments for the first few being better, because they are better. but i feel too removed from them and too cognizant of the fact that he now writes his songs in an office in brighton to feel any access to them. (possible relevant fact #1: i was born in 1985.)

there's something about the 'literary' in the mode of 'literary' songwriting here, more so in the later records, i feel deeply put off by, alienated by. (relevant fact #2: i did my gcse coursework on the lyrics of nick cave, god help me.) (and so being put off from these is partly a matter of cringing at my younger self, but, too, partly a matter of being put off at quite how well these last records map to about that level of hermeneutic whatever.) i think nocturama does a better job than is generally noted of rescuing something from that kind of artifice.

Honestly, the last two are my favourites. It's like he found a new vein of songwriting - his wit has never been sharper - and a new foil (I know Warren Ellis joined in the 90s but this is where he really made his presence felt). Voting Lazarus.

i'm not viscerally put off by this mode of 'literary' songwriting, though there aren't many who can do it even competently.

there can be something depressing about it in cave when it doesn't catch fire - I'm just left staring at the well-wrought urn, politely admiring the well-chosen rhyme. he's always trying to get beyond that (+ a musical parallel - harvey + the seeds could make weak stuff sound good enough, and he's tried to push past that too), just don't feel he's done it so well lately.

Think I'm going to go for Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus. The Boatman's and No More Shall We Part would be close behind.

Boatman's Call is kind of a rarity, in that it was the first time that his "being in lurve" overtook his songwriting so much that he was moved to document it journal-style in song. Which felt awkward and kind of embarrassing at first, but I grew to love it.

Brompton Oratory is still one of my favorite songs.

NMSWP was my gateway Cave and still my sentimental fave.

18 to 25 I was pretty much stalker-level obsessed with him. #secretshamerevealed

feel like Cave's true strength, his actual genius, is in performing tbrr

ikwym, but it hasn't quite been there the last two or three times i've seen him (tho' last time he was following The Swans & I was in a kind of blown-out shock.)

xpost to aero:100% agree. Even seeing him now in this later-career stage, when there's been albums I'm not that into, his performance can turn you around completely on that same material. And he's always so much bigger than the stage, like he's going to bust dowm the walls of the venue.

i haven't listened to Nocturama since it came out. i remember the Bring It On video being amusing, and Babe I'm On Fire too i guess. can't even remember the rest of it. i haven't even listened to the last two albums, guess i was skeptical about post-blixa cave, though I was assured by someone recently that one of them is really good.

I think I'm going to go with the cop out vote of Live Seeds though. Those versions are just great performances by a band at their peak.

― Oblique Strategies, Saturday, July 14, 2012 10:51 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

was tempted by live seeds for same reason, but i always docked it points for the leaving out of the warm arterial spray line on the otherwise excellent vers of 'papa...' - also stripped off to the bone instead of sheared off. it always fucks me up when im singing along!!

xpost to aero:100% agree. Even seeing him now in this later-career stage, when there's been albums I'm not that into, his performance can turn you around completely on that same material. And he's always so much bigger than the stage, like he's going to bust dowm the walls of the venue.

yeah. 1st time I saw him was the From Her to Eternity tour, on a bill with the Cramps. The Cramps at that point were a live act that could not be fucked with in any way, I'd seen 'em less than a year before and been blown completely away. 35 minutes of the Bad Seeds doing 2/3 of their album + "Mutiny In Heaven" + "In the Ghetto" and there was nothing the Cramps could do for 90 minutes that didn't feel like anticlimax.

goddamn

if you'll allow me to induldge in fangirl memory lane: my first show was 97 at the Forum in Melbourne. No opener, I got there ridiculously, stupidly early and was like the 3rd person in when the doors opened. Stood at the front of the stage and nervously smoked half a pack of cigarettes til I was lightheaded. The stage was at least shoulder high. At one point I saw a pair of worn out boots standing on stage at eye-level, and I turned and looked up and I was staring right at Nick and he smiled a big smile and said 'G'day' and I choked out a 'Hi!' and then he was gone.
Pretty sure I died.

The Boatman's Call. Cave's zenith but, as it turned out, an artistic cul-de-sac. It fucked him up for the next two, first attempting to extend its aesthetic/themes (No More Shall We Part -- sometimes brilliant but mostly ponderous); then vacillating between following its path or reacting against it (Nocturama, the Bad Seeds' nadir). The ship righted by Abattoir Blues, for my money Dig, Lazarus, Dig is the complete return to form.

You can make a strong case for a 1/2 dozen of the other records, btw (including DLD).

The Boatman's Call. Cave's zenith but, as it turned out, an artistic cul-de-sac. It fucked him up for the next two

OTMFM - loved that album to pieces when it came out, but paradoxically the moment I jumped ship the austere seriousness that I loved on that album then turned into pompous verbosity.

Anyway, 'Tender Prey' for me all the fucking way.

whalemusic nails it. I was reviewing the last batch of reissues recently and that was pretty much my argument. I like The Boatman's Call but it lacks a lot of the energy and wit and violence that I love about Cave, and I can't help blaming it for the slump that followed.

well I think the Boatman's Call sucks ass and was the biggest fall-off by an artist I'd loved that I've ever experienced & I hate the album viscerally enough to have to say so

i the there's tons of wit in the boatman's call! it's pretty dry and self-aware about its out maudlin-ness. energy and violence, well, you're right that it lacks those, but i was never a fan of cave's style of energy and his violence always seem totally schlocky and hard to take seriously.

kind of think of the boatman's call alongside the cardigans' long gone before daylight - two acts who'd previously dealt in various types of put-on stylised shtick suddenly and unexpectedly getting their heart broken and making a quietly very real album as a consequence.

hard to take seriously

You're not meant to take it entirely seriously. It's equally self-aware. That's a fair reading of TBC though - I love the idea of you going "hey, wait a minute, this guy's good after all" at exactly the same moment as aero went "fuck this, he's dead to me".

i know an insane amount of young ppl (>30) for whom nick cave = 90s on esp boatman's call and 80s cave + birthday party is almost this curio or footnote like beastie boys hardcore days or jay-z on jaz-o records. ridiculous and mystifying to me but i've gotten used to it, it's been a way more common than say encountering young ppl that have ever deliberately listened to a public enemy album.

ack <30

so weird. post 90's Cave feels like a nice oddity to me. I mean its been 15~ years or more, lol that I think of it as a passing fancy. But not associating him with Birthday Party/early 80's is so weird to me

it's not just energy and violence - I love Cave in ballad mode when he's on. I mean think about what I do, songwriting is something I value. The songwriting on the Boatman's Call seems very poor to me - the craft in the lyrics is sub-par, he's just batting way below his average. There isn't one song on that album that's fit to carry "Sad Waters"'s shoes. I just feel like when he decided to try the "I'm being real with you here" style, his first moves out of the gate were clumsy, uninteresting, dull.

"Your Funeral..." I oddly came to this record late, like within the past few yrs despite being kind of a big Nick Cave/B-Seeds fan and man everytime I heard it just floors me. To me, it is his most perfect album and it's funny w/r/t "The Carny", I always feel like I want to dislike that song for the reasonsAerosmith-Boots mentions above, when I put the record on & I start thinking "Oh man I'm going to skip "The Carny"" I never do, I love that song.

xp Even Into Your Arms? Harsh.

yeah, always thought 'interventionist' did a lot of work in the opening line, great funny/serious arresting opening gambit.

So many great observations on this thread. Aero's feelings about Boatman's Call are how I feel about No More Shall, but in retrospect, I feel he started getting lost and smug with Murder Ballads. MB was entertaining when it came out, but I never feel the need to revisit it. He coulda put out a 69 Murder Ballads at that point. The whole span from Murder -> Noctorama he had too clear an idea of what he was trying to accomplish. I feel like Boatman's Call is the strongest of the lot, actually, but mostly because he really engineers some great melodies (Are You the One I've Been Looking For). The lyrics and arrangements get ever more flat during this period. Over-engineered.

I'll forever favor the run of albums up to and including Tender Prey, because those are the ones where he's least sure of what he want to be, and the tussle in reconciling avant noise and blues scholarship and countrypolitan theatre creates so much friction. Your Funeral is the peak. Long Time Man is a performance that never fails to move me- there's nothing more hackneyed than a kill-my-woman ballad, but he injects this shaky detox comedown in his delivery that chills me, but aslo somehow gets across a love for the victim. It feels real and exploratory. Its so lovely and ugly.

I wonder what another collection of covers would be like if Cave decided to do one today? I've enjoyed most of what he's done since Abattoir, because he's genuinely exploring again. He's doesn't seem to fret over his craft any more.

I'm much closer to 40 than 30 but never heard anything until maybe 1993, and never really had it click for me until maybe 2003 or so. First heard the Birthday Party way later than that.

i know an insane amount of young ppl (>30) for whom nick cave = 90s on esp boatman's call and 80s cave + birthday party is almost this curio or footnote like beastie boys hardcore days or jay-z on jaz-o records. ridiculous and mystifying to me but i've gotten used to it, it's been a way more common than say encountering young ppl that have ever deliberately listened to a public enemy album.

red right hand, dude.

Shrek II. Dude did some Smash Mouth scaled licensing for a while there.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

VOTE EARLY AND VOTE OFTEN

You're Funeral... is the closest he came to a perfect album.

Any of the first four, then between firstborn and funeral, couldn't choose for a long time, went with your funeral my trial after all

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

hahahahahahahahah

omg

my dream

it came true!!!

ILX YOU HAVE RESTORED MY FAITH IN ALL THINGS

and now I ride off into the sunset

http://www.40kradio.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/cowboy-sunset1.jpg

Missed this poll somehow, but Henry's Dream is my fave non-Birthday Party Cave album so I approve of this result.

*dances*

I would say Live Seeds is probably my favourite Seeds LP - or it contains my favourite versions of many of the songs, at least. But I like that Henry's Dream was the surprising winner. That was my entry point proper to Nick Cave, and "Loom of the Land" still chills. I think I put that song on just about every mixtape I made for people (especially potential gfs) during the mid-nineties.

Joint fourth is a good showing for Let Love In, as well.

i haven't listened to the boatman's call for a long time, am right now.

this is a really great album.