Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Kicking Against the Pricks

Fierce dissonances tear open gaps of light in the night...

And illuminate, for a moment, a moment that stretches to infinity, the raw and naked truth.

Illuminate, yes. Illuminate and delve.

They delve into the sacred ground of folk/blues classicism, almost as if to reveal, once and for all, its true nature as a disease of the soul.

That almost makes you feel like you're face to face with a sort of mad expressionist cabaret....

With a staging of almost unbearable intensity....

With a well-aimed punch to the face instead of the usual breath of eternity....

Because as far as I remember, these are the soundscapes of the early Nick Cave.

I loved those lands, even if I visited them very little. One does not gladly stroll through hell.

But my memory is, I believe, a bit confused, and finds more certain anchors (or landings) only in some snapshots, which, even though millennia have passed, are still vivid in memory.

I think of the piano of “From her to eternity” and its kicking of the soul...

I think of the extreme Cohen of “Avalanche”... the haunted baritone voice... and the scratches on the wall of a noise that is like the boiling of a pot

I think of the annunciation of Tupelo and the saving legend of rock'n'roll.

All incredibly dark, but not freezing as the wave had ended up being- And indeed the return to the desperate warmth of the blues was the captivating thing.

An experience ultimately similar to that of the captain, without anything caricatured or parodistic though, because here the immersion/adhesion is total

But my Nick Cave is in “Kicking against the pricks”... and it doesn't matter if it's just a collection of covers...

Yes, yes, this is my Nick Cave...

I still remember the leap from the chair, in the mid-eighties, when I first heard “Muddy Waters”, the track that opens the album.

Few notes of the piano, a voice never so beautiful, those choruses that few like the Bad Seeds can do, and a fantastic interlude of metaphysical music.

No more sabbath...and everything wonderfully drained...two steps into the eternal...and a crooner, just a little (just a little?) out of his mind...

Even though a little bit of sabbath returns soon after, with the blues full of angles and edges of “I’m gonna kill my woman”, all pauses and suspense....and always that voice and always those choruses...

Oh god, what one can do with the blues...

Then, who invented the angles and the edges? Maybe Thelonious Monk on a full moon night, but Thelonious Monk has nothing to do with Nick Cave.

Or does he have something to do with it?

But the magic doesn't end here...

And it ranges from tracks that veer towards an eerie (and classic) folk that concedes only vague hints (let’s say those that are needed) of past expressionism....

To other oddities like sailor songs... or folkie chants declaimed with devotional respect, even though always, always, always very Cave-like....

The new Cave, however, the one that starts exactly from here and for the first time ventures into the kingdom of shadows with the minus sign...

Subtract, subtract, subtract...subtract and re-subtract...that little thing called essentiality...

Then, surprise of surprises, besides traditionals and folk/blues classics, there is also rock.

Little tunes like “Hey Joe” and “All tomorrow's parties”...

With Hendrix rendered with a hypnotic and martial blues... and the Velvets...

The Velvets rendered in a way that I lack the words...so I'll throw out, just to say something, a little formula: sick and rattling epic (can that work?)

But there is also room for cotton candy... and perhaps this is ultimately the true stroke of genius

Not bad to take a pop candy like “Something gotten's hold of my heart” and after sucking and resucking it, returning it exactly as it was before.

Which then, exactly as it was before is a manner of speaking, Nick Cave is not Gene Pitney

And only Nick Cave could bring cotton candy into the realm of shadows....