Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
Kicking Against The Pricks

"We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice say to me in Hebrew: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads" (ACTS 26:14).

I've been involved with the Gospel since I was a kid. Tales, prophecies, martyrs. I discovered the wonder of Nick Cave not long ago, a year I think. Tales, prophecies, martyrs. "Kicking against the pricks" is the third album by such Nicola Caverna (with the bad seeds, once the birthday party is over, after the guys near the door have left), but that I, at five years old or so, didn't know yet.

I only knew that for Saul it was hard to kick against the pricks, I read and heard it during the Sunday sermons. In hindsight, after three years of middle school, five (pardon... six) of high school and after two years of university parking, I know that the fateful "pricks" has an equivalent in English which reads "pricks"... which, in slang, therefore also indicates a class of people with a number of characteristics quite... well, the "jerks" or the "idiots" or the "assholes" or... complete it yourself, the Italian language, unlike the English one, is quite rich in imaginative insults (in two years of university parking, I must have learned something, right? In fact, if you wish for clarification on English profanity...).

Ah, so he plays with sacred texts, our Nick! The answer is yes, and anyone with a grain of sense knows it. From the king of kings born in Tupelo to the apostles buried under fifteen feet of pure white snow, the list is long, coexisting in Cave's poetry, sacred texts with the southern Gothic imagery and both becoming the pillars, as much as the sick blues of the fathers and the grim romanticism of Poe.
Here, the evangelical diversion dominates in the Gospel song ("Gospel" in English... I told you, in two years...) "Jesus Met The Woman At The Well". A revisitation, indeed, of an old traditional spiritual, here sung in four voices by Nick, Blixa Bargeld (a brilliant guitarist recruited years earlier from Einsturzende Neubauten or however the hell it's written), by multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey (the real pillar of the band) and by Barry Adamson (who would soon leave the bad seeds), while the good (and handsome) Wydler limits himself to play it by tapping on a few drums to keep the rhythm of this short sung sermon.

Oh, I almost forgot, nothing in this album springs from Cave's pen, that is, they are covers, as they are called. Reinterpretations of classics, I prefer. In other words, the game, in a nutshell, was this: in the first two albums, the influences were more or less veiled. Blues, Cohen, Gothic literature, Poe, Waits, Elvis, Gospel. Here, just to kick a bit against the jerks (which then would be the record companies that Cave so hated), he throws off the mask, and the influences are right there, in front of the eyes and inside the ears of everyone. That, then, almost paradoxically, this album sounds almost more Caveian and bedside than many of Cave and the Bad Seeds' albums, well, that's another story, or rather no, it's the same story that I've been trying to tackle for about an hour now, but I realize I have inevitably bored you, deeply mortally bored, and so I get to the point.
Here is Cave, ladies and gentlemen. Everything. There are the murder ballads (for those who thought he pulled them out of his sleeve with the eponymous album of '96) "Long Black Veil", "Hey Joe" (yes, that very one by Hendrix, almost unrecognizable in the bedside version... actually, believe me, it's an amazing thing, something to try at least once in life, an unparalleled auditory delight).

There is the dirtiest blues that already characterized the beginnings, in "I'm Gonna Kill That Woman", a classic by John Lee Hooker, here even dirtier and more raw than before. There is love, the same that will mark as a brand the future albums, with its black bursts of pain. There is the sense of death whipped to blood by toxic and alcoholic madness. There is God. And, yes, there is the suburban splendor of "The Singer", or "The Folksinger" by the beloved and never too lamented Johnny Cash, here slightly modified in the lyrics. According to many, the most beautiful song of the combo.
Everything sounds damn Bad Seeds style, everything bears the indelible mark of Blixa's heavy and distorted guitars, Harvey's mastery, Adamson and Wydler's obsessive rhythm. Yes, the true protagonists of this story are the Bad Seeds and their rides, even before the real (and royal) authors of the enormous songs contained here.

It is Cave's voice, the real protagonist. Shamanic in the outburst of "Black Betty" (yes, her, black betty bamb-a-lamb!), here transformed into a voodoo ritual, complete with percussion from an aboriginal documentary (we're still in Australia, okay...). Unusually sharp and vibrant in the sweet "Something's gotten hold of my heart". Stolen from the best crooners in "The Singer". Charming and filthy in the immense "Muddy Water" (perhaps his most beautiful vocal performance of all time), accompanied by Blixa plucking the muted strings, heavy as a boulder, and by the stunning male choirs, another trademark of the Seeds. In short, what I'm trying to tell you is that here is Nick Cave. Everything. And here are the Bad Seeds. With their rides, okay, their outbursts, their sonic orgasms, their lysergic madness. There are the Bad Seeds, I was saying.

And here is Nick Cave. 1986. This is an album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Everything.