Crime & the City Solution
Just South of Heaven

"La Festa di Compleanno" has just ended and it ended badly. So, while Cave embarks on a solo career, Rowland S. Howard and Mick Harvey (who is also simultaneously with Cave in the Bad Seeds), together with Henry Howard, Rowland's younger brother, and singer Simon Bonney, give shape to Crime & the City Solution, a project already existent by Bonney, but unproductive.

The heterozygous and heroin-addicted twins Cave/Howard, after a three-year toxic stint in London, both separately decide to seek new life in West Berlin, a stronghold of freedom and Western decadence, separated by a wall from the inhibition and squalor of the DDR and real socialism.

The Crime's recording debut happens on the Mute label in 1985, with The Dangling Man E.P., which contains four tracks where their stylistic hallmark takes shape under the sign of an extremely dramatic blues, clearly influenced by the haunted sound of the late Birthday Party. The raw sound of punk and original blues, sepulchral voice, rarefied rhythms, vitriolic guitar interventions, unhealthy, and paranoid atmospheres, are the elements that we will find again in the unsettling and more substantial Just South of Heaven, evocative from the title alone, published the same year and which sees the entry into the band of Englishman Epic Soundtracks (real name Kevin Paul Godfrey), former drummer of the Swell Maps (and brother of Nikki Sudden) that will allow Harvey to focus on guitar and organ.

Just South of Heaven, in 28 minutes, outlines an extraordinary decalogue of solemn and austere "modern blues" for fearless hearts and dark souls. Amidst sudden flashes and darkness, between stillness and furious spasms, Simon Bonney's evocative voice and Rowland Howard's lacerating guitar ferry the suffering spirits across the Styx, into inhospitable territories, where even pain and death take musical form. Sparse, dark, and dramatic music, whose rhythms, tempos, and melodies penetrate deep into the soul, creating a sense of bewilderment in the listener.

Under an expansive and stormy Australian sky, gloomy Aboriginal drums announce the end of times. Distressing western guitars scratch at the soul's doorstep like starving, gaunt wolves. The sinister tapping on a piano's keys is a forewarning of disaster.

Just South of Heaven opens with "Rose Blue," a dramatic gothic sermon proclaimed in an empty cathedral. And it's not surprising that, on this malevolent post-blues trajectory, "The Coal Train" leads on a pilgrimage - once again - to the Birthday Party's sepulchre through a path of atonement that stretches from the violence of blues-punk to the barbaric darkness of gospel. "Stolen & Stealing" outlines a rarefied and tenebrous scenario, where the guitar's distortion mimics the cold wind's blowing, and the percussion replicates the clinking of objects, with Simon Bonney reciting his blues homily amidst this desolation. "Five Stone Walls," a resolute electric ride, restores the energy consumed traversing the cursed and wild lands that brought us here to face the furious challenge at the OK Corral of "Trouble Come This Morning," a melodramatic and enthralling end-of-times western ballad. The concluding "The Wailing Wall," the Wailing Wall, drowns this album in the reverberation of the slide guitar and tears of a solemn and spectral blues elegy.

Bonney and company, with Just South of Heaven, vie with the close relative Nick Cave for supremacy in the realm of the darkest and most cursed blues. Blues that embrace the human dimension's dark and desperate side, awaiting judgment day with the awareness that no one will come to save us.

And it's hard not to notice the similarities - at this stage - between Crime & the City Solution and Nick Cave, who also in 1985 releases The Firstborn is Dead, an extremely dark and powerful second album with the Bad Seeds, also a vademecum of modern blues where Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Elvis, and Dylan meet post-punk. And such affinities do not surprise if one considers that blues had long been a powerful underground current in the music of the Birthday Party, from which both Cave, Howard, and Harvey originate. All the more so considering that Mick Harvey, an influential multi-instrumentalist and arranger, plays simultaneously in both formations.

In 1986, the Crime released Room of Lights, which contains the remarkable "Six Bells Chime," a song that impressed director Wim Wenders to the point of inviting the band to perform the song live in Wings of Desire/Il Cielo Sopra Berlino, his 1988 masterpiece in which, a few scenes later, Nick Cave also appears with his "From Her to Eternity," almost as if to confirm the existence of an umbilical cord that, despite everything, continues to unite the former guests of the Birthday Party. But when the film was released, Crime & the City Solution—in the incarnation immortalized on screen—no longer existed. After Room of Lights, Rowland S. Howard left the band, bringing along his brother Henry and Epic Soundtracks, to form These Immortal Souls, while Mick Harvey, Simon Bonney, and his wife, violinist and painter Bronwyn Adams, also a co-writer of the lyrics, recruited new musicians to continue the Crime adventure.

Just South of Heaven. Just south of Paradise. An unsurpassed pinnacle of Crime & the City Solution's artistic production, embellished with Doorsian and Morriconian echoes, it is one of the most astounding and authentic modern blues records, malevolently fascinating and capable—contrary to what the title claims—of dragging far from Paradise. Much farther and much deeper.