Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
Your Funeral... My Trial

THE REVIEW

If someone asked me which is the most toxic album by Nick Cave, I would probably answer "Your Funeral... My Trial". The "Good" Nick had and will give further evidence of the exasperated destruction that invades him (see for example, "From Her To Eternity", or as a Debaserian noted, "Tender Pray") but in this album there is a sick and enclosed atmosphere, intimate as never before, as if there were no contacts with reality. Nick himself says: I dedicated myself to creating a mythological world in which to make my characters act and in which I could effectively live. It was a very conservative world in which good and evil never met. And, indeed, the album seems like the possible soundtrack for His only book, "And the Ass Saw the Angel," a heroin-addicted world where pain, domination, and ignorance exist... the album comes out in 1986-7, and the "Bad Seeds" are still the band that accompanies him... faithful, fantastic. To the essential contributions of Blixa Bargeld (he will also compose the song "She Fell Away") and Mick Harvey, increasingly the band's jack-of-all-trades, ready to do everything, pianist Thomas Wolf and American guitarist Kid "Congo" Powers are added. The songs on the album see a Cave very committed to honing the songs and lyrics, influenced by his listening, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits above all, and here and there blues or folk (!!!) pop up and this, if we want, is the part I usually detest about Nick Cave. That vein that tends to America, to Bruce Springsteen & company. but fortunately, in this album, there's much more, also because every song has that fundamental stamp that keeps it away from the "slimy" and sweetened musicality, because His voice has a depth that reaches kilometers, so much so that you can hear and "see" an impressive abyss.

And then... Then there are some magical, fatal songs far from the light. I’m talking about "Strangers Than Kindness" and the title track "Your Funeral... My Trial": listening to them doesn’t bring typical sensations, but a mix between the unconscious and dark, sharp sides. In "Jack Shadow" the reference is to a prisoner in a maximum-security jail, and this is, in a certain sense, the condition that Cave lives, imprisoned among the demons of conscience and persecutory delusions, which will also lead him to play a prisoner in a film, and in the video of "The Mercy Seat". But the true apologia of reality, the total detachment from contacts and people, lives in "The Carny". The first sensation you have is that of having ended up in another dimension, in another time (if we can talk about time...) the music is halfway between a circus and a funeral service, and dark, icy tones color the scene. It seems like a theatrical scene, with little lighting. The song talks about a showman ("The Carny" indeed) taken from Cave’s Book, like other figures (the nagging "Sorrow") but what I'm most keen to express is the particularity of this song, its rhythm similar to that of a murderous and solitary waltz, amid cries of long-forgotten dreams... It will also be picked up by Wim Wenders, who will put it in "Wings of Desire" in a scene where a melancholic acrobat listens to it in her shabby trailer. I believe everyone should hear it at least once: it’s a bit like Venice, you have to go there at least once in your life! The album closes with "Scum"—a spit, the song starts and then a repeated and jaunty somewhat mean rhythm. Ultimately, this is the motive of the album: disdain and distance, spitting in "your best dishes," and the need to feel good, in this world...