Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
From Her to Eternity

THE REVIEW

Frightening screams of witches tied to a stake and burned slowly in the purifying pyre of the Holy Inquisition. The flesh burns, the bones melt and return to the heavens in twisted spirals of smoke, steeped in bile and agonizing fear.

Or again.

Silver wolves that powerfully leap on their succulent prey. Jugulars torn, flesh shredded, tendons and cartilage crushed. In a steaming orgy of blood where the predator drinks greedily from the surrounding pool of blood, under the complicit gaze of the moon.

Or again.

Soldiers on the front line stuffed with amphetamines sent to crash through the enemy front. An oblique downpour of lead, barbed wire that scars their desperate courage and tanks that reduce their limbs to formless mush.

Or again.

A flurry of flies reveling on a rotting dog carcass at the roadside. Nauseating miasmas, hysterical buzzing, clots of blood mix with the optic nerve on the rubber trail left by an untimely skid.

Or again.

The raw and visceral prose of Henry Miller, with images entangled in a swarming verbal mush that dazes and plunges the reader into the hidden recesses of his useless and trivial existence.

Or again.

Nick sitting by the edge of a sidewalk, swollen and bruised, speaking to us of his solitude amidst psychotic roars, guttural grunts, and inhuman screams. And the Bad Seeds? Their vitriolic dissonances, essential and with the specific weight of a ton, are scalpels. Scalpels that Nick uses to rip open his belly and show us his guts that he devours before us.

Or again.

A faith, an immense faith that all this is necessary. That scattering our insides on the floor is the only thing to do if we really want to come to terms with ourselves. Then to start again, making mistakes and suffering some more.