Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
From Her To Eternity

THE REVIEW

It is said that during the time of the Birthday Party, he wrote a letter to his girlfriend on the subway, using a syringe as a pen and his own blood as ink. And on the cover of this album, Cave looks like a vampire. Pale, emaciated, an ideal double for Klaus Kinski.

Far removed from the romantic songwriter of “Foi na cruz”, or even the slightly sickly one of “Into my arms” Nick Cave has indeed softened the tones of his work over time, progressively moving towards a more traditional songwriter conception. But on the first album with the Bad Seeds, he is more than ever the voice of obsession, without that almost playful atmosphere that made the Birthday Party’s albums a provocation, however extreme.

Here, a more serious and mature atmosphere pervades, with dark and expressionist arrangements calibrated to create a raw thriller-like atmosphere, between moments of suspense and extremely violent outbursts: - I want to tell you about a girl - the singer announces in the title track, one of the highest moments in the Australian's entire repertoire, which in a climactic crescendo weaves an anguished tale at the piano like certain stories by Edgar Allan Poe, in a heart-pounding tension between increasingly stunning industrial noises: so when he screams “Tell me why” with inhuman fury, it's like looking straight into the eyes of a serial killer just before being killed. Love as a throbbing desire, as a murky obsession.

It is an incredibly dark, hallucinatory album that manages to marry the gothic with the most sickly and creeping blues, as in the long and gloomy nocturnal ballad “Box for black Paul” for piano and slide or in the equally macabre “Saint Huck”, where Cave emerges for his exceptional interpretive skills, worthy of the most frenzied Carmelo Bene. His acting abilities are still on display when he transforms a subtle ballad like Leonard Cohen's “Avalanche” into a sly and venomous exercise in acting, or in the paroxysmal delirium of “Cabin Fever”, a new Captain Ahab adrift on the ocean of madness, or even in the prison blues “Well of misery”, which proceeds slowly following a lopsided harmonica at the rhythm of whip strokes.

In all the tracks, the singing is overwhelming, of ferocity and psychotic intensity. From start to finish, an extremely degraded and unhealthy atmosphere is palpable, achieved without resorting even once to the distortion of guitars.
However, the literary quality of the lyrics and the elegant and paradoxical austerity of the Bad Seeds' accompaniment partly betray the premise: the themes of the album seem to be violence and paranoia, seen, however, from a perhaps overly cultured and aestheticizing perspective compared to, for example, the first terrifying works of Michael Gira's Swans, a character in many ways similar to Cave. Despite this, what remains is still one of the main and original blues albums of recent decades, and the disquieting calling card of one of the most important modern songwriters.